airfoilmod says in #2341:
It is always hazardous to rely on the unknown, or statistics. If what you mean is "one in one hundred thousand" of an additional occurence, think about how many months it takes the Fleet to hit 50,000 trips. At that point the chance? ONE in TWO. Let's see, 228 a/c, one trip a day, 1,000 every 4 days, twenty thousand every 80 days (Five to One), etc. See?
The statistics just don't mean that. The implication is that on analysis of several million trips (or tens of millions - I don't have my statistics textbooks to hand and my maths degree is getting a little rusty) it will turn out that the event will have occurred in about one in a hundred thousand. The statistic does not mean that there will definitely be one occurrence, and only one occurrence, in every sample of 100,000 trips. Without presence of a common causal factor, any two trips are equally likely (or unlikely) to hit the problem.