Beware the claim not substantiated with data. Case in point, the very first statement in the Annual Safety Review 2006 released last month by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). “Flying is the safest form of transportation,” it boldly asserts, offering not a shred of evidence in support.

From other sources, we know that flying on an airliner is safer than travel by car, but this comparison mixes a private form of transportation with a highly regulated one. The comparison is not apt.

Measured against other forms of public transportation, aviation does not fare so well. For instance, in the United States, the fleet of school, city and interstate buses accumulates about the same miles of travel as the country’s airline fleet and has a slight edge over air travel.

Japan’s high-speed “Bullet” train has been operating since the early 1970’s without a single passenger fatality. During the same period, Japan’s airlines have experienced crashes that have killed hundreds.

In Europe, high-speed trains have amassed a similar safety record. If the risk of travel by air is assumed to be 1, then for a train journey of 400 miles, the risk of being killed is roughly 0.7.

Suffice to say, air travel is not the safest mode of travel. Contrast the advertisements for air travel with the reality. Advertisements offer a picture of spacious serenity, frequently with a flight attendant offering a fine wine or fluffing a pillow. The reality is more like a print by William Hogarth, the pictorial satirist and editorial cartoonist of 18th century England. People are packed into an aluminum tube loaded with explosive fuel, with hot flames raging out the engine exhausts, and enough electric power coursing through the innards to light up an office building. The reality is that passengers are cocooned in hazards. The fact that flying is as safe as it is, and in fact is such a quotidian experience these days, is one of the modern miracles of technology and organization.

While the risk of a fatal accident in a car or train is more or less spread evenly across the journey, most air accidents take place on takeoff or landing, a small fraction of the journey time. Moreover, whether a passenger boards an airliner in Europe, North America, or Africa makes a difference.

There is a subtle and pernicious effect from accepting the claim that air travel is the safest way to journey from point “A” to point “B” – it could lull the industry into a sense of complacency about safety.  The readiness of the industry to correct shortcomings, the zeal with which oversight bodies look at safety, and the degree to which safety is inculcated into an airline’s culture are clearly affected.

The EASA report discusses European air safety in the context of the worldwide record. It notes that flying on a European carrier is about 14 times safer than boarding a jet operated by an African airline (see Figure A). The report is also frank about the record in Europe:

FIGURE A: Rate of fatal accidents for the period 2000-2005, scheduled and non-scheduled operations (per million flights). The graph starkly illustrates the effect of regulation (Western operations) versus unregulated and infrastructure deficient operations (Africa). Source: EASA

“In 2006, the number of fatal accidents in Europe for fixed wing aircraft, public transport operations, was six. Compared to 2005 (five) and 2004 (two) this means an increase in fatal accidents. However, the number is equal to the average of fatal accidents for the decade 1997-2006.”

The report tried to put the best face on the record:

“Both in 2005 and 2006, the high number of fatalities was the result of a single accident with more than 100 fatalities. On 9 July 2006, a French registered Airbus A310 of Sibir Airlines overran the runway when landing in Irkutsk, Russia, resulting in 126 fatalities. Even though the aircraft involved in this accident was registered in an EASA Member State, it was operated by a company from a non-EASA Member State.”

It can easily be seen how a single accident can skew statistics when the number of accidents is small. If the 2 August 2005 overrun at Toronto of Air France flight 358 had had a similar outcome, the statistics would have been quite misleading for that year. One way to smooth the year-to-year variations would be to employ 3-year rolling averages, as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) does when measuring safety progress.

It is clear that one error chain can easily lead to multiple fatalities, give high body counts and not necessarily indicate any overall downturn in safety standards.

In a similar fashion, aircraft design deficiencies known about but not acted upon can ultimately ratchet up and skew accident statistics and deaths (the Congonhas accident [Airbus throttle levers and unsafe runway overruns], B737-800 spoiler anomalies, Dash-8 main gear problems, and B737NG wing-slat actuator bolts [which were implicated in a fire at Naha last August]). The lesson here is that slow mandates by regulators – based in part on manufacturers’ reticence to prescribe fixes – can generate accidents. This is all but admitted in paragraph 5.3 of the EASA report: “EASA also takes specific actions in response to the accident experience by various actions, including the issuing of airworthiness directives.”

One way to read this, in the EASA view, is that it takes an incident or accident to generate an airworthiness directive. In other words, the response to safety deficiencies is largely reactive.

Other areas of the report merit comment:

• There is little doubt that a large slice of the credit for the wind-down in the overall accident rate since 1968 (when it reached a low of 0.5 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles) has been due to the inherent reliability of the turbine engine, in comparison with the unreliability of the ubiquitous turbo-compound reciprocating engine. Turbine engines now comprise 99% of the world’s airline fleet (see Figure B).
  This credit is born out by the report’s noting that only 18 accidents of some 424 during the 1997-2006 were attributed to “power plant failure or malfunction.”
• Approach and landing phase accidents, at 40% of the accident pie, was still twice the takeoff accident rate of 22% (see Figure C). A significant number of these accidents involve runway overruns, in which marginal runway lengths and unsatisfactory RESA (Runway End Safety Areas) lengths and surfaces figure largely in the destroyed or damaged aircraft.
• EASA muddies the waters by mixing statistics. EASA starts off by ruling out accidents related to unlawful interference, and then advises on page 10 that the fatality figures include unlawful interference.
• It is quite interesting that the European BLACKLIST (operational throughout 2006) of carriers denied skies and airports on the continent because of safety deficiencies gets nary a mention as having had any effect on safety.
• The report indicates that EASA is gathering statistics for the first time on General Aviation and Aerial Work and intends to develop a record over time to measure progress.
• Many helicopter accidents in 2006 are yet to have investigation reports published. However, it is reported that: “In 2006, almost 85 percent of the accidents occurred with light helicopters with a MTOM [maximum take off mass] of 2,250 kg [5,000 lbs.] or less.” Many of these accidents are weather-related and half that figure again is training related.

FIGURE B: Distribution by type of propulsion, global fleet of public air transports with a take off weight of 20,000 pounds or more. Source: EASA

FIGURE C: Distribution of fatal accidents over the phases of flight. The graph shows that in the last decade most fatal accidents occurred during approach and landing, even though most of the time aboard is spent in the en-route or cruise phase of flight. Source: EASA

Overall, the EASA report presents a good view of European air safety. It concludes with a healthy dose of realism:

“The data show that the safety level of European aviation is high and that there is a trend toward continuing improvement. Nevertheless there are concerns: improvement rates are lower than in the rest of the world … and some accident categories are almost exclusively dominated by accidents of European aircraft.
“In addition to the fatalities in public transport operations, almost the same number of persons were fatally injured in European General Aviation related accidents. There is a need for a coordinated European effort to address these issues.”

Talk of aviation as the safest form of transport was blessedly left in the executive summary. The EASA report provides hard evidence that there is work to be done to improve safety. One might describe the attention devoted to safety as akin to riding a unicycle – it requires constant attention and adjustment. (For the full EASA report, go to www.easa.eu.int/doc/COMMS/Annual%20Safety%20Review%202006.pdf)