William Voss, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Flight Safety Foundation, asserts that air safety has improved significantly in the past decade:

“In the last 10 years, the accident rate has gone down dramatically around the world, and principally it has gone down in areas where we have started using information before accidents occur. Maybe we don’t have full-blown information from SMS [Safety Management Systems], but there’s a lot of FOQA [Flight Operations Quality Assurance] data … and I’d argue that in the last decade it’s had a big effect.

“To visualize what we’ve done, if you took the 1996 accident rate, and applied that to traffic levels we’ve experienced in 2006, a simple piece of math would say we should have experienced 30 major crashes in the world that year. Instead, we had 11. So someplace, somewhere, there are 19 planeloads of people alive today that would not otherwise be alive. And these people are just as real as those who lost their live.

“Just imagine, if we shut down Customs someplace and 19 airplanes landed and [we] backed up and took a picture, that’s one year’s worth of accomplishments. That’s one year of what’s could be lost. They could be your family members.”

FIGURE A: In the Swiss cheese model of accident causation, the holes represent poor defenses or absent defenses. NATCA asserts that holes in the first two slices of cheese can be laid at the feet of the FAA. Source: NATCA