Safety’s Worst Enemy Is a Great Success Rate

Anyone reading newspapers or watching television over the past few weeks must have the impression that commercial airplanes are falling from the sky like reindeer at Christmas time. It just isn’t so.

For the last dozen years or so, there has been about one major commercial aircraft accident a year, some years more, some years none at all. The passenger-fatality rate has run just about one per billion passenger-miles. Since there are so few accidents, each one is headline news. Commuter airlines are not quite as good as the major scheduled lines, just as buses are safer than automobiles. The most dangerous way to travel is on foot. About 7,000 pedestrians a year get killed on the roads, many of them drunk.

On a commercial jetliner, I am far more likely to die of a “natural” heart attack or stroke before landing than in an accident. If I were trying to kill myself (there is no accounting for taste) by sitting in commercial airplanes and waiting for a fatal accident, I’d have to wait in the air for hundreds of years. It is, in fact, appallingly safe to travel by air, compared with all other modes of transportation. Sixty years ago that would not have been conceivable--something has been done right.

So what is the fuss all about, and is the Federal Aviation Administration as inept as it seems? If it is, how has the extraordinary level of safety been achieved? And if we want to pay for an even higher level of safety, could we get there by tinkering with the FAA?

The only way to achieve perfect safety in flying is to avoid it. There is no other way. That applies to flying, driving, playing poker, eating, drinking and lifting Sunday newspapers. Sure, some activities are more hazardous than others, and some are more rewarding. And the alternatives to flying are more dangerous, unless we stay home and are blessed with a peaceable spouse. (There is even a joke about someone who read that most accidents happen within a mile of home, so he moved.)

Life is a matter of weighing the good against the bad, and striking a reasonable balance. The risk of getting killed too soon isn’t the only thing to account for. Many of us drive around in ordinary cars, when we would surely be safer in tanks--safety isn’t everything. And people who proclaim that cost is no object when it comes to saving lives are thinking of spending other people’s resources.

Aviation safety is not a simple subject, to be mastered in an hour by an average lawyer. It is a complex mixture of aircraft design and testing, crew training and skills, maintenance practices, navigation and guidance design and implementation, learning from experience, weather forecasting, and, yes, rules. The FAA makes and enforces the rules in this country, and there is little evidence that they are unusually well-conceived or particularly important. Among knowledgeable technical people, the FAA is traditionally held in a kind of benign contempt, simply because it is always so very far behind the times. There are historical and institutional reasons for this, and they are so deeply ingrained that substantial short-term improvement is simply not in the cards. This is not meant to denigrate the FAA’s seriousness of purpose, or commitment to aviation safety.

The FAA computer fiascoes have justifiably attracted bad press for many years, so let’s use another example. The first space flight was in 1957, and it was immediately clear that long-distance communication would never be the same. Now, in 1996, nearly all your telephone conversations and television sitcoms are relayed by satellite, but the FAA has the same old system. More than 30 years ago, the military services planned and fielded satellite-borne navigation systems, which eventually grew into the tremendous achievement that is the Global Positioning System, now available in rental cars and even elbowing its way into aviation. While all this was happening, did the FAA have any meaningful plans to use satellites for communication or navigation? No. In fact, there have been no substantial changes in the national air navigation and communication systems since soon after World War II. The technology was crying to be heard.

Some believe it is a mistake to combine all the functions of the FAA--operation, enforcement, rule making and systems development--in one agency. The FAA has failed most egregiously in development, and that failure has corrupted the other functions. But people who propose to confine the FAA entirely to its regulatory role have probably never had close contact with regulatory agencies. If the responsibility of the job is nothing but regulation of what other people do, there are no career incentives, nothing that attracts the best people to the job, and nothing that brings out the best in the people who are actually on the job. The head of one regulatory agency said he wanted his people to be dull, reliable but not clever. With that psychology, you get mediocre agencies, run by mediocre people with limited vision, doing a mediocre job, and dragging the regulated industry down with them. Expansion of regulatory agencies, the first cry of the inexperienced when something goes wrong, is rarely a good move.

Accidents will happen (the laws of probability never sleep), and the FAA doesn’t need a congressional hearing every time they do. But it does need prodding from the informed safety community, on a continuing and formal basis--even when there are no accidents. Feast or famine doesn’t work. The only informed oversight the agency now gets is from the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency. And the FAA has not only fallen behind in technology, it has also fallen behind developments in the science of risk assessment and management. The aircraft manufacturers know far more than the FAA--the safety records of their aircraft are vital to their business survival.

Yes, something should be done, not because there has been an accident, but because aviation safety is important to the country, and should be managed professionally. And there is plenty of money. The trust fund is flush, and politicians--all frequent flyers--are eager to help. Everything that follows is aimed at ensuring professionalism in aviation-risk management.

* The FAA should indeed be restored to independence. It was a mistake to put it into the Department of Transportation.

* A solid outside safety study should be organized to pin down the real level of aviation safety, and its roots. This should be done by experts on risk management and assessment, and, of course, on aviation. It should be quantitative and professional, not a “balanced” cacophony of competing interests. Probably it should have no recommendations--facts speak for themselves. It would cost a few million dollars, and be well worth it. If you don’t really know what the risk is, you can’t manage it--accident records are just the tip of the iceberg, as are horror stories.

* The FAA administrator should have a strong, perhaps statutory, advisory committee of safety experts, whether he likes it or not. It doesn’t do to run on autopilot until there is an accident, and then be overwhelmed by the noise. The FAA is too ingrown, and requires informed oversight, openly conducted.

* The creeping politicization of the National Transportation Safety Board, which has served well over the years, should be reversed.

All these require congressional or executive action--the FAA lacks either the authority or the will, or both.

The sky isn’t falling in, but let’s make sure it doesn’t.*