How is commercial air travel so safe?

Factual Questions
1

I fly more than some, but a lot less than some as well. I’ve flown around the planet several times and across the country a bunch, too.

Thing is, I kind of get anxious about flying on the days I have to get on a plane. I remind myself of the odds. It’s something like 1 in 5,000,000 or more than I would die in an airplane crash.

How do they do that? How do they:

  1. Make sure the planes are definitely working properly. How do they avoid mechanical failures while in the air?

  2. Make sure nothing else happens that causes a crash?

I’m amazed at the safety of commercial airlines and I am just wondering how they do it.

2

You can drive any old POS on the road. Bumper falling off? No worries; just get a wire coat hanger and tie it up. Or you can use duct tape. Blown cylinder? Too expensive to fix. Just drive until the car dies altogether. Bald tires? Just don’t get caught.

Airplanes are different. Airplanes in commercial use (including your little Bugsmasher 150 down at the flight school) must be inspected every 100 flying hours. All aircraft must be inspected annually. If it isn’t airworthy, you can’t legally fly it. Airplane makers are notoriously conservative. Piston airplanes are still running large displacement, low RPM engines similar to ones used nearly a century ago. Sure, they’re more reliable now; and more efficient too. But the basic layout is the same. Could automotive technology be used in aircraft? Just think of the improvements in car engines over the past 20 years. Sure it could. But engine makers have to certify their engines with the FAA; a process that is long and expensive. The good news is that engines are proven designs that are extremely reliable.

Speaking of certification, every part has to be certified. A starter on a Beachcraft Bonanza might be the same one used in Buicks of the day. But the Beechcraft one has been tested and has a certification plate on it.

And that’s just for ‘little airplanes’. Commercial jets are much more complex and have more stringent rules to follow. (Not that GA rules are lax.) They tend to have more redundancy built in that little airplanes. Commercial jets are expensive, and they are expected to earn their keep and then some. Makers strive to build the best planes they can; fast, good payload, safe, and with as little downtime as possible.

Airplanes spend most of their flight time en route. The dangerous parts are takeoffs and landings. So most of the time they are in the safest regime.

Pilots are very well trained. A ‘Sunday pilot’ like me needs at least 40 hours of training before a license is issued. Most people take more. I have a feeling there are driving schools that ‘train for the test’. An instructor will be looked at by the FAA if too many of his students are not competent on their check rides. Instructors I’ve known insist they will not turn a new pilot lose until the pilot is safe and competent. The pilots who fly the jets have thousands of hours, and the ones who fly the ‘puddle jumpers’ have hours on the four figures.

Air crashes are seldom caused by one thing. Most are a combination of events. Pilots are trained to deal with emergencies, and to break the chain of events so that an emergency does not turn into a catastrophe. Some things you just can’t do anything about. Structural failure, fire, and so on are often not survivable. But again, it’s usually a chain of events that lead to it. A mechanic forgets to install screws holding one part of the leading edge of the horizontal stabiliser, the guy who signs off the repairs misses it, and bits fly off. Multiple mistakes. Fortunately, there’s a lot of checking in flying, and mistakes are fairly rare. ‘Little airplane’ pilots inspect their airplanes before each flight. When was the last time you or someone you know made a habit of inspecting his or her car (Lights work? Oil and fluids full? Steering wheel works? Other controls functional? Gauges all in the green?) before driving off? And commercial jets have teams of people checking things and signing them off.

So in a nutshell:
[ul][li]Proven, reliable technology[/li][li]Stringent adherence to maintenance procedures to minimise failures in flight[/li][li]100-hour and annual inspections, with certified mechanics’ signatures to verify the aircraft is airworthy[/li][li]Preflight inspections by maintenance personnel and/or crew to catch anything out of the ordinary[/li][*]Lots and lots of training and experience[/ul]

3

If something goes bad on a car, it can really ruin your day, but it probably won’t be a disaster. If something goes bad on a plane, it is entirely possible for it to be a true disaster of the worst kind. Thus, there’s a much bigger incentive for quality on a plane than on a car.

Just one little example: If you read the manual that came with your car, it probably says that every time you drive, you should first take a quick look at the tires. I’d be surprised if even one driver in a thousand does that. But I’ll bet that they do check them on the airplanes.

4

To add to what’s already been posted, they test the living heck out of critical components:

5

Incidentally, every airplane flying right now has open writeups. While none of them are safety-of-flight issues, you’d still cringe if you saw the maintenance book. Happy flying.

6

The Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs) set forth the airworthiness standards that dictate aircraft design. The FARs are also quite encompassing, regulating almost all areas of aviation, including certification of pilots and the operational activities of airlines.

7

I think redundancy is a big key to airline safety. Multiple engines, multiple hydraulic systems, multiple electrical systems, multiple flight control systems, multiple pilots, multiple autopilots, the list goes on. The aircraft is designed from the ground up so that no one failure of a system will be catastrophic and some systems can withstand multiple unrelated failures. The redundancy is so great that you can often dispatch the aircraft with a number of things unserviceable and there is still redundancy available.

8

Another component of the overall excellent airline safety record is extremely careful study of the accidents that do happen, coupled with a willingness to change things as experience dictates.

9

You saw that show too, eh?

I would say that another factor is the meticulous investigation of accidents. If you think about it, the data and voice recorders won’t do a bit of good for the plane they’re in[sup]*[/sup]. They’re designed, installed, and maintained for the benefit of planes yet to come. Aviation is safe today because we know what’s gone wrong in the past and figured out ways to stop it happening again.

  • Not strictly true. Not every accident is a write-off of the plane involved.
10

I think this year passed some sort of record for commercial flying miles without a fatality.

11

I guess one way to put it is that aviation is very safe because people have demanded it. From the beginning of the industry we have had an intense interest in making it safer, particularly when we started filling bigger and bigger aeroplanes with the travelling public. Everything else flows from there. The need to know why crashes happen and the desire to prevent repeat occurrences has driven both the accident investigation side of things, including post accident data gathering, as well as the set of design rules and the technological improvements that have actually made the machines themselves less prone to accidents.

It’s worth noting that although commercial airline travel in western countries is quite safe, general aviation, both private and commercial can’t boast the same safety record. I don’t think I’ve known someone who has been killed in a car accident but I know several pilots who have been killed flying, and I know far more people who drive cars than people who fly aeroplanes.

12

Some figures:
http://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=13672

The important parts:
The accident rate for 2011 was 1.13 fatal accidents per 100,000 hours flown
Fatalities per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled (2011): 1.10

That does raise the question of what an appropriate conversion factor is. 200 miles/hour is probably optimistic for GA, but even with that, GA is at least 5x more dangerous per mile. Also, that’s “fatal accidents” vs. “fatalities”, and obviously a fatal accident has at least one fatality, but often more.

Of course, unlike autos, GA accidents are almost always “self inflicted”, and if you can avoid a handful of rookie mistakes and dangerous situations, you can do a lot better than the average.

13

I think the more general principle here is that commercial flight is a closed system. Every aspect is controlled, and when an accident does happen, the lessons are folded back into the system.

This is unlike automobiles, where the behavior of drivers is largely uncontrolled, and thus you have an open system. Auto manufacturers and traffic engineers do their best to make things safer, but drivers then often change their habits to reduce the safety again. There is a large class of problems that nobody can do anything about.

14

I was wondering about this. If I’m on a commercial aircraft and one of the jet engines on the wings…well, stops, does the whole craft go down or can they emergency land with the rest of the engines?

I’ve flown to Korea on large planes and am over the ocean for a long time. If one of those massive engines goes out, can they reach land and attempt to land the craft?

15

Things have been incredibly safe in the U.S. for the past decade. Before you click on the spoiler button below, see if you can guess how many crashes there have been since July 2003 involving U.S. carriers or on U.S. soil in which passengers have been killed.My count is two: Comair 191, which crashed on takeoff from Lexington, KY in August 2006; and Colgan 3407, which stalled and crashed near Buffalo (possibly due to pilot fatigue) in February 2009. In addition, a Southwest plane slid off the runway in a winter storm in Chicago in 2005, causing one death on the ground; and two fatal crashes occurred on repositioning flights (crew only), including this spectacular bit of asshattery. None of those last three involved passenger deaths, though.

16

There is no point during a flight, from the moment the takeoff begins to the end of the landing roll, that an airliner can’t suffer a complete engine failure and continue to a safe landing or safely abort the takeoff.

17

I believe they would not be allowed to carry you if they were not certified to do exactly that, all else being equal.

That’s the plan: ETOPS

18

IIRC they can just keep on flying, the pilots won’t, they will land asap but there are rules for multi engine planes that they must be air worthy with an engine out. I do not know the specific rules but some of the pilots here do.

Which brings me to pilots. The pilots here in the US ( and I would presume the rest of the Western World) are extremely well trained. Many are ex Military fighter pilots, the Airlines compete for these guys and gals when they get out. There are physicals, flight training and exams every year plus mandatory retirement at a certain age. In short, when you get on an commercial aircraft, you get into a vehicle that is in top notch shape and flown by at least two of the most capable people in the World. Their mission is to get you there safely, relax you are in good hands.

Capt

ETA Ninjaed thrice

19

Somewhere on Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Concert in Central Park” Paul says “Gerry Niewood on saxophone!” Gerry was on Colgan flight 3407. :frowning:

20

A word to the wise: When hopping around the globe DO NOT fly on any non-Western, non-major carriers. Statistically you’re more than ten times likely to be involved in an accident, due to lax, well, everything! (maintenance, security, pilot training etc.)

Forget crossing the ocean, losing an engine on take-off is absolutely the most dangerous time to.