Mountain Bear re#43, (my #42); this is not so much ‘muddled thinking’ as poor or incomplete communication with my use of the word ‘outcome’.
I was referring to the severity of an unacceptable outcome; and 12 ft beyond the end of a paved surface (or even off the side) is an unacceptable outcome for whatever reason.
Re ‘… negative outcomes are important …’ My view involves both negative and positive outcomes.
Negative outcomes, accidents and incidents, are rare events usually involving several contributing factors, amalgamated and triggered by circumstance, and often human behaviour is a central element. These aspects are investigated and the industry has to apply the lessons to be learnt to a wider range of operations.
The positive outcomes are the everyday successes of operations where humans contribute to safety. These operations contain much more information about how safety is achieved. Unfortunately this information is rarely gathered and analysed, reducing the availability of the lessons to be learnt. However, individuals and crews can reflect on their performance and learn from ‘good’ or ‘not so good’ performance in daily operations by debriefing and thus reconsidering their behaviour.
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A positive aspect of the statistics of runway excursion accidents is that there are relatively few fatalities with respect to other scenarios. Whilst this is good news for some of areas of operations and airport design, it often hides the actual risks and reasoning involved. This is not helped by using safety statistics based solely on fatalities which may have evolved from the public (human) interest which directs the general perception of safety.
Unfortunately modern media focuses on the sensational; this aspect has evolved with culture and technology, and possibly reflects a poor understanding of aviation operations.
We have to live with this and where possible ‘manage’ it. Remember, public perception can be swayed by media sensationalism and our industry might suffer the result (recall the turboprop ‘vendetta’ in the 1990s).
Many threads in this forum offer good advice – don’t feed the trolls, but the media are not trolls (some sciolists, maybe). The attention seekers will wane – get use to it, the others require education, knowledge, awareness, - an explanation of the operational context – an understanding of our (industry’s) point of view.
Public forums such as Pprune offer a unique opportunity to demonstrate how safe and successful our industry is, but to maintain this position we need to provide balanced and well judged view of events and occurrences, most of which we may not understand due to lack of fact.
This requires all of us to consider our perceptions of events carefully, to think about what we know (or don’t know), and how or why we apply these thoughts – biases or false belief.
Thus, everything we should be doing ourselves, and would wish for the media (education, awareness, and application), probably applies to us in daily flight operations, less we over-sensationalise our capabilities as operators.