Tableview,
I'm sure that those in the industry and close to aircrew and engineering will laugh at this piece of journalism.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that, for the first time since the Flight Safety Foundation, a lobby group based in Alexandria, Virginia, started collecting figures on aviation safety, there were more accidents around the world involving corporate jets than passenger planes. That is something for busy executives to ponder as they climb aboard the company Gulfstream. It is also something air-safety administrations need to pay a good deal more attention to.
That aside, can the huge strides made in aviation safety over the past decade continue? Modern passenger jets are stuffed with aids that make them nigh impossible to crash. Even so, there are dark mutterings about the increasing use of carbon fibre in their construction—to save weight and reduce fuel consumption. Some experts fear such composite materials may hold unpleasant surprises—in much the way that unpredicted failures caused by metal fatigue destroyed the reputation of the de Havilland Comet, the first passenger jet to go into production, in the 1950s.
Others express concern that the cockpit automation designed to make aircraft safer may overwhelm pilots with its complexity and undiagnosed bugs. But whatever direction future safety measures take, there is now no shortage of data about accidents. As tools for analysing big data improve, airline safety is likely to evolve from being merely a reaction to past mistakes to becoming a way of predicting and preventing future ones.
It's all a matter of risk. The full article describes the comparison of cars, trains, buses etc. and acknowledges issues with safety in "some " countries, and so points out that there are some things that affect how safe things REALLY are.
The lack of homework in this article is shown when there is no mention of safety concerns from within the airline staff.
No quotes from pilots or engineers.
As to the evolution of aircraft safety, it's in the hands of airline employees to try to maintain what we have now let alone the future.
With the current crop of managers and board of companies like Qantas (Borhetti excepted), it's akin to swimming against the tide.