Regulation Policy

Establishing Priorities In Aviation Safety

A coalition of airlines, plane manufacturers and a pilots' union wants the federal government to focus its resources on safety solutions that would prevent the most prevalent air disasters and save the most lives. They contend government regulators sometimes force airlines and manufacturers to spend resources on marginal concerns.

Among the recommendations in the 80-page report of the Commercial Aviation Safety Strategy Team:

  • Concentrate on enhanced pilot training, new on-board navigation and collision- avoidance devices, fire-retardant cabin materials, turbulence injury prevention, new- generation child restraints, reduced maintenance errors, ways to prevent engine explosions and better safety data.

  • Give low priority to such "issues du jour" as requiring heart defibrillators on aircraft, enhanced cabin air quality, and some security procedures such as 100 percent matching of luggage with passengers.

The U.S. accident rate from 1987 to 1996 averaged 0.5 major accidents per million departures, compared with 0.7 for Western Europe, 4.8 for Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union, 5.7 for Latin America and 13 for Africa.

  • During the same period, 2,396 people died in crashes classified as "controlled flight into terrain," 312 of them on U.S. airlines -- a category of air disasters almost always caused by human error, in which a fit aircraft remains under pilot control until it hits the ground.

  • Another 2,221 people died in crashes attributable to loss of control during flight, 482 of them on U.S. airlines.

  • These two categories were by far the greatest cause of aviation deaths during the period, with sabotage a distant third at 607 deaths.

Boeing Co. has estimated that even with today's low crash rate, the number of plane crashes worldwide will increase to one a week by 2015 due to the increased volume of air traffic. Thus the goal of the Safety Strategy Team is to reduce accident rates 80 percent over the next decade.

Source: Don Phillips, "Aviation Group to Push Safety Agenda," Washington Post, February 12, 1998.

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