You're Safer On
An Airplane
PERRY FLINT
In an average year, approxi- mately 98,000 Americans die from infections they acquire in
hospitals, according to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention.
Many and perhaps most of these
deaths could be avoided if well-understood sanitary methods, such
as proper sterilization of equipment
and hand-washing, were followed. In
addition to the toll from infections,
medical mistakes kill 44,000-98,000
each year, states a report from the
Institute of Medicine.
We don’t know how these death
rates measure up on a per capita basis
against the health care systems of
comparably developed nations. We
do know that if we were sitting in the
US Congress or the White House,
and we were looking at picking the
low-hanging fruit in eliminating mistakes and carelessness as a cause of
human misery, suffering and death,
we would probably want to do all we
could to encourage hospitals to adopt
things like mandatory standardized
pre-operation checklists, incident-reporting systems and data-driven
analysis to understand why mistakes
occur and how to prevent them.
The air transport industry has been
doing this kind of thing for years.
That’s probably one reason that air
travel remains far safer than, say, a
trip to the hospital for a routine pro-
cedure. Of course you wouldn’t know
this from watching Congress, which
fixates on exceedingly rare breakdowns
in aviation but appears not to have the
faintest interest in what’s happening
in the operating room. Consider what
occurred last spring after Southwest
Airlines—a carrier with an exemplary
safety record—was found to have
operated 46 737s in violation of an
FAA airworthiness directive. Not
only were the chairman and CEO
hauled in to testify before the
cameras, but FAA was browbeaten as
well. Under political pressure, FAA’s
boss, the Dept. of Transportation,
created an Independent Review Team
to assess the agency’s approach to
safety regulation. Perhaps reading the
Washington tea leaves, FAA already
had opened its own special industry-
wide investigation into airline compli-
ance with airworthiness directives.
Now the verdict is in: US airlines,
despite losing billions of dollars this
year, are 98% compliant with ADs.
And DOT’s panel of outside experts
essentially validated the collaboration model that has led to a dramatic
reduction in US airline accidents,
while calling for a more arms’ length
relationship between airlines and
inspectors (see NewsBriefs, p. 11).
No one—outside of Congress—
should be surprised at the findings.
Consider that as of this writing,
more people in Manhattan have
died from cranes crashing into
their apartments within the past
12 months than in US commercial
airline accidents. More people have
died from eating tainted hot peppers
or injecting contaminated Heparin,
from tigers breaking out of the zoo
and mauling bystanders, than have
died in airline accidents. Throw in
crocodile attacks and jellyfish stings
and the same statement can be made
for Australia, another nation that
recently has become fixated on the
issue of aviation safety following the
Qantas decompression event and a
string of lesser incidents.
We don’t know how much longer
commercial aviation can continue
to improve its safety record. There
are well-known problem areas—
Africa, South America and Russia/
CIS—that ICAO and IATA are
working hard to rectify. Disaster can
strike anytime, as happened in Spain
in August and Russia in September,
and it is fully possible that before
this editorial appears the industry
will confront a new tragedy.
Nevertheless, we are fairly comfortable in predicting that grandstanding by politicians in Washington
or Canberra (or Brussels) will do little
to prevent one. The real safety work
is being done in OEM technical labs,
in flight simulators and classrooms,
in data centers where incidents are
recorded for study and in the numerous
safety colloquiums and conferences that
bring together manufacturers, airlines,
airports, ATC, and safety regulators.
If politicians around the world truly
wanted to help make aviation safer,
they could unlock the purse strings
and make some much-needed investment in critical infrastructure. But
Congress can’t even be bothered to
pass a new FAA budget and European
air traffic modernization is woefully
underfunded.
As Aaron Karp notes in his story
beginning on p. 42, excursions are
the leading cause of runway accidents and the rate is not going to be
changed by bullying airline executives
and safety regulators in front of the
cameras. It could be helped with more
government money for new safety
systems in the cockpit and on the
ground. But don’t hold your breath
that will be forthcoming. Politicians
around the world seem to take a
perverse pleasure in taxing the airline
industry but with a few commendable
exceptions are remarkably reluctant to
give much back.
EDITORIAL
