The italicized quote is making a false conclusion. Just because most crashes are caused by safety equipment does not mean this equipment (or the added complexity) increased the chance of failure (crash).
Think this way.* Planes with no safety equipment will crash every 1,000 flights. Planes loaded with safety equipment will crash every 10,000,000 flights. 99.9% of the planes loaded with safety equipment crashes are caused by the safety equipment.
The majority of crashed are caused by the safety equipment. Did they increase the chance of failure?
The crashes are not necessarily caused by the safety equipment. They are caused by the lack of properly functioning safety equipment.
Imagine you’ve got a plane with a parachute for the pilot. For the sake of simplicity, the plane has a 10% failure rate, and the parachute has a 10% failure rate. So one out of ten times, the plane crashes, and one out of a hundred times the pilot dies. 100% of pilot deaths are caused by the failure of both plane and parachute. But removing the parachute doesn’t fix the problem, because a non-parachute has a 100% failure rate, compared to the parachute’s 10%.
Well, I guess if you’ve fixed all the obvious problems, the only times problems will occur will be the unobvious ones. If it means having one crash in a million caused by safety gear, where the rate before the safety gear was implemented was ten per million, that doesn’t seem like a bad trade to me.
Similarly, I’ve heard that the existence of seat belts allows drivers to be more reckless, creating accidents through stupidity. If we get ten deaths through seat-belt-inspired stupidity versus 100 through non-belted flying-through-windshield road-pizza moments…
Further, there’s the sports-gear argument. Hockey players were extra gear. This allows them to hit each other harder than the old less-protected days, leading to a trade-off.
Nothing ever solves a problem - we just hope it helps more than it hurts, leading to a net gain.
Back before the equipment was bettered, some players hit just as hard. They just gave and absorbed more damage. Hockey used to a game of horribly scarred players. They took hundreds of stitches during their careers.
I don’t think the premise of the OP is correct. Most crashes aren’t caused by faulty safety equipment. Unless you want to be overly broad in your definition of “safety equipment”. For example:
1/15/2009 - US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River due to a failure of the engines to safely continue running with a goose in them.
1/27/2009 - A FedEx plane ran off the runway due to improper use of the brakes or steering.
I didn’t say it was a good argument, though it was kicked around a few years ago, relating to boxing gloves, i.e. in the bare-knuckle days, it would be foolish to try to punch your opponent in the skull because you’d just break your own hand. Now with padded gloves, head-hits are more feasible. I dont’t know the relative casualty rates of 2009 and 1909 boxing, though.