Author: 'Tombstone Imperative' The url to his essay is in the following article:

A Reinforcing Argument
Sep 04, 2000 HREF=#A7>
Support for the GAO position about how best to measure safety comes from an essay in the August 7, 1999 edition of New Scientist magazine. Author Andrew Weir asserted that deaths or accidents per distance traveled dilute the accident rate for airplanes in comparison to cars or trains. Further, he argued, while the accident risk in a car or train is more evenly spread across the journey, the opposite is true for airplanes, where 70 percent of the accidents occur on takeoff or landing, just 4 percent of the journey time.

For these reasons, Weir suggested, deaths should be measured against the number of journeys made. This is not quite the same as the departure metric suggested by the GAO above but certainly represents a related approach. Weir used "passenger journeys," so 100 people in a jetliner taking off represent 100 passenger journeys in one departure. Weir claimed the "passenger journey" metric is used by the insurance industry. "By this measure, air travel takes on a rather different complexion," Weir wrote. "Deaths per 100 million passenger journeys are, on average, 55 for airliners compared to 4.5 for cars, and 2.7 for trains. Only motorbikes, at 100 deaths per 100 million passenger journeys, are more risky than aircraft on this basis." Indeed, in the U.S. motorcycle drivers are sometimes referred to as "organ donors" because of their high accident rate.

Weir is saying that driving is ten times safer than flying, when measured as deaths per journeys. Further, he argues, the fatal accident rate in commercial aviation has stabilized at about one per 1.5 million departures, and it has stubbornly remained there despite the infusion into the fleet of the latest generation of jets equipped with fly-by-wire (FBW) and flight management technology.

Weir's take on air safety flies in the face of the widely held industry view that flying is the safest mode of travel. Alan Downs' 1997 book, "Beyond the Looking Glass - Overcoming the Seductive Culture of Corporate Narcissism," may bear on the industry perspective of air safety. Downs points out that those listening only to the beat of their own corporate drum might not hear the locomotive of destructive libel bearing down the tracks on them. "A narcissistic company rarely handles criticism constructively," Downs writes. "Instead, it chooses to manipulate feedback to suit its own purposes. Some tactics used include putting a positive spin on news that is otherwise negative, and attacking the critic." (Note 1: For the full text of Weir's opinion essay, see this website: http://www.newsci entist.com/ns/19990807/flightinto/html. Note 2: We are indebted to Bart Crotty for bringing Down's observations on the cult of corporate narcissism to our attention.)

Sorry the essay no longer seems to be available.

An interesting review of the book:

Cutting corners, costing lives
REVIEWED BY PHIL SHANNON

The Tombstone Imperative: The Truth About Air Safety
By Andrew Weir
Simon & Schuster, 2000
372 pp, $14.95 (pb)

“Nothing is more important to us than safety”, “Safety is our number one priority”: all the variations on this theme were heard from the top bananas of Ansett Airlines after their entire 767 fleet was grounded over Easter by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority because of continuing safety concerns.

It is the tune sung by airlines the world over to persuade us that no effort or expense is spared on safety. It is also one of the more barefaced corporate lies, as British writer and broadcaster Andrew Weir shows in his gripping book on how safety is compromised by the aviation industry's pursuit of profitability through cost-cutting.

Safety improvements are only made when their cost is less than the litigation costs of human lives lost. Only after sufficient passengers and flight crew have been killed in fiery crashes do the government regulators enforce new safety measures. As one US regulatory official put it, “We regulate by counting tombstones”.

Weir dispatches the airlines' statistical propaganda on the safety of air travel. The airlines claim that the number of air fatalities for distance travelled is the lowest of all transport modes, which is true, but as 70% of accidents happen at take-off and landing rather than the long, cruise portion of a flight, the number of journeys rather than distance travelled is the most important factor, for travellers, in assessing the likelihood and consequences of a crash.

Comparing fatalities per number of journeys, air travel is ten times more dangerous than car travel, and twenty times more dangerous than train travel.

All aircraft crashes and human deaths, says Weir, are preventable but safety has never been a prime consideration of the airlines.

The safety improvements that came with the replacement of piston engines by jet engines, radar, more sophisticated air traffic control and navigation were a by-product of technological change which was made for economic, not safety, reasons.

continued:

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2001/450/450p26.htm