US: Airlines, including Southwest, are so safe it's hard to rank them by safety
American air carriers in general are so safe that ranking them in terms of safety is difficult. Tuesday’s accident was the first fatality Southwest had experienced in its 47 years of operation. It was the first death on a US-registered carrier in nine years. In fact, airlines have become so safe that many experts say ranking them by safety is problematic. “The real thing to look at is how rare an event is,” said Manoj Patankar, head of the school of aviation and transportation technology at Purdue University. “In this case, it’s extremely, extremely rare,” he said. The last time there was an uncontained engine failure in a US plane was in Sioux City, Iowa in 1989. That accident killed 111 of the plane’s 296 passengers. “There are almost 29,000 commercial flights a day in the United States. This is the first person that’s died in an accident (in the United States) in nine years. Put that in the context of automobile accidents and think about how safe it is,” said Michael Rioux, COO for JDA Aviation Technology Solutions, a flight safety consulting firm. That said, there are global airline safety lists. The danger now is that of complacency, believes Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot renowned for safely landing a US Airways jet on the Hudson River off Manhattan in 2009. Today, air travel has become so safe "we can no longer define safety as the absence of accidents," said Sullenberger, now retired from flying and a safety expert and speaker. Sullenberger is concerned that as airlines have become more consolidated and globalized, and inherently more cost-competitive, even good major airlines have reduced their training towards regulatory minimums and away from the higher standards. The danger is that with intense cost-competitiveness, there might be a drift towards expediency, a tendency to do what’s cheapest or easiest, not what’s best. <br/>
https://portal.staralliance.com/cms/news/hot-topics/2018-04-20/general/us-airlines-including-southwest-are-so-safe-its-hard-to-rank-them-by-safety
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US: Airlines, including Southwest, are so safe it's hard to rank them by safety
American air carriers in general are so safe that ranking them in terms of safety is difficult. Tuesday’s accident was the first fatality Southwest had experienced in its 47 years of operation. It was the first death on a US-registered carrier in nine years. In fact, airlines have become so safe that many experts say ranking them by safety is problematic. “The real thing to look at is how rare an event is,” said Manoj Patankar, head of the school of aviation and transportation technology at Purdue University. “In this case, it’s extremely, extremely rare,” he said. The last time there was an uncontained engine failure in a US plane was in Sioux City, Iowa in 1989. That accident killed 111 of the plane’s 296 passengers. “There are almost 29,000 commercial flights a day in the United States. This is the first person that’s died in an accident (in the United States) in nine years. Put that in the context of automobile accidents and think about how safe it is,” said Michael Rioux, COO for JDA Aviation Technology Solutions, a flight safety consulting firm. That said, there are global airline safety lists. The danger now is that of complacency, believes Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot renowned for safely landing a US Airways jet on the Hudson River off Manhattan in 2009. Today, air travel has become so safe "we can no longer define safety as the absence of accidents," said Sullenberger, now retired from flying and a safety expert and speaker. Sullenberger is concerned that as airlines have become more consolidated and globalized, and inherently more cost-competitive, even good major airlines have reduced their training towards regulatory minimums and away from the higher standards. The danger is that with intense cost-competitiveness, there might be a drift towards expediency, a tendency to do what’s cheapest or easiest, not what’s best. <br/>
