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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 0806.PDF
FLIGHT International, 30 May 1963 775 World Air Safety THE UNITED KINGDOM COMPARED WITH OTHER LEADING AIR TRANSPORT NATIONS By the Air Transport Editor IN a White Paper on aviation safety published just over a year ago,* the Ministry of Aviation said: "The United Kingdom's record has shown a progressive improvement and is better than the world average." This statement was supported by some statistics comparing Britain with the USA, France, Netherlands, Australia and the world. The comparison was on the basis of passengers killed per 100m scheduled passenger-miles, and also fatal accidents per 100m aircraft miles. Three five-year periods ending 1961, 1960 and 1959 were considered (paragraph 13, page 4, and Appendix II, table 2). At the time the White Paper was published three serious accidents had occurred to British airliners on charter flights, within the space of just over six months, costing the lives of some 170 passengers and crew. The White Paper's comparisons were not as comprehensive as they might have been, because they did not take into account these accidents—the very accidents which had in large measure given rise to the concern which prompted publication of the White Paper. It seemed important to check the validity of the White Paper's observation about British air safety. Is it in fact improving? Is it above average? The conclusion of a Flight International survey, compiled during the past year, is that British air safety is improving, but it is below— some way below—the world average. The unpalatable fact is that although Britain is the world's No 2 air transport nation (excluding Russia and Communist China), she ranks in terms of safety below Australia (the safest), Scandinavia, USA, Japan, W. Germany, the Netherlands and Canada, according to the conclusions of this study, which examines the 14 biggest air transport nations and one other. How is air safety measured? The criterion most commonly used is the number of passenger fatalities per 100m scheduled passenger- miles. The airlines reckon that one passenger killed per 100m passenger-miles is "acceptable." The record of the past 18 years, according to ICAO statistics, is shown in Fig 1 (on a passenger-km basis):— Fig I ICAO world safety record (1961 and 1962 estimated) 120,000 It will be seen that the trend is steadily down, and that the remark ably regular sawtooth pattern of the post-war years was broken in 1961 for the first time—a year in which the fatality rate was below the past ten years' average. This was not a fluke year: the trend continued down in 1962. Of course, the measure of fatalities per so-many-passenger-miles is in many ways unsatisfactory, not so much for establishing a total world trend, when it is representative enough, but for making comparisons between one country, or one airline, or one type of aircraft and another. For example, a big airline with a very large volume of passenger- miles might suffer over a period of time one accident a year in which a few passenger fatalities are involved. The same airline might also, in the same period, have got away with a number of nasty near-scrapes. Yet this airline would appear to have a safety record better than that of a small airline which flies for 20 or 30 years without scratching a passenger and which suffers, through no fault of its own, a disastrous tragedy which kills 100 passengers. Obviously unfair. The criterion also has limitations when used to compare airlines of similar passenger-mileage. Airline A might suffer a series of culpable accidents, killing 50 passengers in six accidents. The similar-sized airline B might suffer over the same period—through no fault of its own—one accident killing 150 passengers. Airline B would appear in the statistics to be three times more dangerous than airline A. Obviously absurd. Again, airline C might carry the same volume of passenger-miles as airline D and both might in the same period suffer one accident each, killing the same number of passengers. Both would appear to have the same safety record. Yet it might well be that airline C operates five times as many flights, and in a more adverse climate. Airline C is obviously the safer operator, but it is libelled by the fatalities per passenger-mile index. Another important flaw in this index is that it does not take into account non-scheduled flying, nor does it take account of scheduled cargo operations. Together these two activities comprise perhaps 15 or 20 per cent of total world air transport, a proportion which is tending to increase. Nor does it differentiate between high-load- factor and low-load-factor operators, tending to discriminate against the former. It also ignores crew lives lost. Passenger fatalities per 100m scheduled passenger-miles provides a reasonably acceptable measure for total world air transport safety, as depicted in Fig 1, though even here there is the nagging thought, first expressed by Mr Bo Lundberg a year or two ago and mentioned to IATA by Lord Brabazon last September (and the other week on a BBC TV programme about pilots). This is simply that if one killing per 100m passenger-miles is acceptable to the industry today, it certainly is not going to be acceptable to the industry or to the public in 30 years' time, when the passenger-mileage volume will be so great that it will mean 10,000 people killed per year, and big, black air-crash headlines every other day. In order to compensate for the limitations of this most commonly accepted index, and within the limitations of the available traffic statistics, four criteria of air transport safety have been adopted for this analysis. These criteria have been applied to the accident records of 15 leading air transport countries over what is felt to be an adequately long period of time—ten years. Obviously, a comparison over anything much less than five years produces a 46 At 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 *"Aviation Safety," Cmnd 1695, April 1962 ("Flight International," April 26, 1962, pages 641-642).
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