Has Commercial Air Travel in the United States Become Riskier?

What Happened?

During the past year several high-profile incidents in the U.S. commercial aviation industry have raised questions about the risks of passenger flying. The National Transportation and Safety Board have recorded six commercial airline accidents this year, with total fatalities of sixty-seven. 

Robert Mann Jr., a former airline executive told USA Today “Given the number of people who fly and given the exposure that these incidents get, it’s not surprising that there would be some concern if not alarm about them.” 

Which raises the question, has commercial air travel in the U.S. become riskier?

Why it Matters

The fatal mid-air collision above Washington D.C. this year represented the first major airline crash with fatalities in the U.S. since 2009. Given there are over four thousand flights a day, going nearly sixteen straight years without any fatal crashes of major airliners indicates the commercial aviation industry in the U.S. still has a good safety record. 

Why have there been so many recent incidents in the U.S. commercial aviation sector? 

Mathematicians call this type of phenomenon a clustering effect, where long periods of time with few or no incidents is suddenly replaced by a group or cluster of several incidents over a much shorter period. 

Though that observation doesn’t explain why these incidents have occurred, it does suggest this type of pattern happens with complex systems from time to time.

Another potential explanation is political, namely the Trump Administration’s attempts to reduce the size of the federal workforce, with includes the Federal Aviation Administration. Could a reduction in the FAA workforce have contributed to the string of recent incidents? 

This seems unlikely because the FAA has cut only about four hundred workers out of forty-five thousand, too small of a decrease to have system wide ramifications.

While many of the recent incidents are understandably unsettling for passengers, some of the near misses or close calls caught on video show a system that still works. Even if a disaster was averted at the last minute, it was still averted because trained pilots and crew did what they were supposed to do. 

How it Affects You

The aviation industry uses a layered approach to safety, meaning there are multiple checks in place system-wide to prevent disasters. Anyone of those checks can stop a fatal accident, and on a daily basis airlines operate under a layer of multiple system checks. 

Which means the likelihood of multiple system failures occurring all at once is extremely remote. That’s why crashes or major airline disasters are so rare.

While no system is perfect, the safety measures in place do work nearly all the time. The aviation sector hasn’t gotten riskier, but incidents including close calls receive more visibility now because there are more ways to record them. Afterall, everyone has a smartphone with a camera.