Hi L1011 Happy New Year.
I feel that we may end up getting into a p***ing contest on this one! This is a complex subject and it would be very useful to have a detailed analysis of the different factors leading to an airline failure following an accident - compare ValuJet and Birgenair, Pan Am and TWA and so on.
There have been a number of published studies on this topic but none, to my mind, have successfully identified all the possible factors and their relationships which would allow the impact of a given accident on a company to be modelled in advance.
Since the only way to get the CEO and the Board to spend money on safety is often to show them how much it will hurt to have an accident - it would be nice to be able to put the impact on the company in terms of $ (the only thing they may understand).