Flight Safety-2013
 

Almost the end of this year but, crickey ! Forget the whole year ; just reading down the threads on R&N makes for confidence shaking. Aircraft crashing all over the place;aircraft landing at wrong airfields;aircraft declaring fuel emergencies;pilots being disabled in flight; drunk pilots , etc ! Is it just me or could this year rank amongst the worst for aviation safety ?

You use pprune to gauge how safe aviation is?

Take a look at this and do the sums:-
http://www.boeing.com/news/techissues/pdf/statsum.pdf

I think the number of wrong airfield landings are statistically interesting because they are the only non-deniable indications of pilot error. If this number goes up you can bet that other mistakes have increased. In the same way, the number of diverts is a good indication of serious mechanical issues. I guess the number of runway excursions of a given type also serves as a canari.

In fact these are the only "incidents" where the public can see imeediately that something unplanned happened. Every other type of incident (mechanical failures, pilots falling asleep etc) is only visible to industry insiders, and in the case of non US airlines I am not even sure that reports are always filed.

So I believe that the number of wrong-airfiled landings can be used as a basis for seeing whether it is a "safe" or "unsafe" year. The public will never see the true stats on the number of bird strikes, uncontained engine failures, or on the number of overtired pilots who make a recoverable booboo.

Edmund

edmund - sorry to distract, but what is a canari? Is it a byrd?"also serves as a canari."

Edmund
 

You sayI don't know how you come to that conclusion - please explain. Most diversions I have been involved with have nothing whatsoever to do with mechanical issues (although a very few in 38 yrs of flying have).


Regards
Exeng

BOAC
 

I see you now have 17,676 posts. You must have nicked a couple of thousand or so of mine,

I now see what I am facing when I retire!!

Hope you are well.


All the best

Way to go to Beagle!

PS - Are you ever going to retire......?:)

ATB

I started the thread with broad interest & a comment on the R&N site which gives a run down of what seemed to be one prang after another. No, I don't use Pprune to guage flight safety but it does give a broad overview. With less than a week to run to the close of 2013, we can add Nigel re-arranging his right-wing and pretty well demolishing an airside building. And, a freighter goes down in Russia. I didn't ask if 2013 was the worst for air safety but was it "amongst" the worst ? Thanks for the professional replies & links. Interesting.

BOAC
 

canary in a coal mine:

"An allusion to caged canaries (birds) that mining workers would carry down into the mine tunnels with them. If dangerous gases such as methane or carbon monoxide leaked into the mine, the gases would kill the canary before killing the miners, thus providing a warning to exit the tunnels immediately."

Proxus

Forgive me for weighing in with my ignorance, but this is the internet. And, since this is the internet, there's someone who makes a living compiling just these data. He will also tell you that, counting hull-loss accidents of airliners resulting in fatalities, 2013 had six more accidents than 2012, 29 to be exact. That's still fewer than any other year after 1945 (and, given his definition of "airliner" as "a civilian-registered aircraft capable of carrying more than 14 passengers", there weren't many of them flying in 1945). As far as fatalities, 265 is the least of any year since 1945, and by a wide margin.
Of course, the Boeing data is better scientifically: it excludes intentional acts, and anything coming from Russia (which is why they won't give you the number of A/C departures before the CIS' entry into IATA, and, in general, why they exclude Soviet-built aircraft, for which systematic data are hard to come by).
Still, you get the idea. The absolute peak of fatal hull losses occurred in 1972, and the database is sobering reading: maintenance mistakes, crews getting behind the aircraft on approach, non-standard R/T practices, and lots and lots of CFIT. And that's just in the US. And they were flying far fewer aircraft back in '72. If that level of safety (and security) were maintained today, there'd be a fatal hull loss somewhere in the world every day, and one of three of them would be in the US.
Yet the Boeing data tells us, in terms of accidents per departure, 1965 was five times worse.

The fact that there are more and more aircraft flying has to be allowed for in the safety stats.

Eurocontrol Safety I to safety II
Interesting article.

The stats used give safety in the order of 1 *10(-6)
Europe as part of the SES concept wants to move to 1*10(-7).

"Outcomes" both good and bad often come from the same actions.

The plan is by recognizing what we do right and reinforcing this we can actually enhance safety.

As a measure of the number of aircraft movements per year while having say 2 incidents in year xxxx and 4 in year yyyy while this is an 100% increase year to year statistically its not relevant.

We are possibly approaching a situation that where an incident has great learning value for local operations, as a factor in improving safety over all it is actually of limited value.