Safety Carries A Cost For Everyone

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Firebird2XC

Well-Known Member
This blog/article highlights how safety adds cost as an operational factor, and how lobby groups and regulators interact because of it. The author's focus is mostly for the airline types out there, but it works well for everyone involved in aviation. It shows how regulations, legislations, and the bottom line interact when faced with making the operation safer.

http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/blogs/ain-blog-safety-carries-cost-everyone

At a time a shortage of pilots has prompted regional airlines to contemplate relaxing their experience minimums to attract new first officers, the proposed rule issued recently by the FAA to require an Air Transport Pilot (ATP) certificate for first officers—along with its accompanying 1,500-hour flight-time minimum—must keep human resource managers awake at night. It also puts alphabet organizations such as the Regional Airline Association in a serious bind.
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To the general public, the RAA cannot show anything other than an unassailable commitment to safety, regardless of the cost consequences to its membership. To its airline members, its responsibility lies not only with projecting a positive public image but also with cost containment, which, in effect, translates into lobbying for less regulation, not more. Meanwhile, the members of the association serve another master—their major airline partners—whose interests sometimes conflict with those of the smaller airlines on which they depend for passenger feed or low-cost supplementary service.
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Champcar said:
Killing people also costs money and lots of it.
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Sadly, the airlines actually do cost/benefit analysis on this, and it's almost always cheaper to kill people every few years than it is to do the right thing. Don't believe me? Read the FAA's own proposed rulemaking for the new FT/DT rules. Check out the footnote that talks about why they're excluding cargo carriers (big surprise that they hid it in a footnote). Without even mincing words, they just come right out and say that each dead person costs a few hundred thousand dollars, and since cargo planes aren't likely to kill too many people if they crash, it just isn't worthwhile for them to spend the money on compliance with stricter fatigue rules. Now, if the FAA is willing to say it about cargo planes, what do you think the airlines say behind closes doors? A crash every few years will cost them millions. Sure. But complying with true safety requirements will cost them those same millions every single year in perpetuity. Make no mistake about it, reducing safety is cost positive for the airlines. Without regulators and unions to keep them in check, the profit motive will always win out.
 
Oh yeah.

Listen to Aviation Safety Professor Bill Waldock of ERAU talk about why he didn't fly on the DC-10.

It was less expensive to, for a period of time, absorb lawsuits from "hull losses" than it was to fix some of the primary components of the aircraft with known problems.

Sadly when it comes to safety, if safety cost > liability cost, well, they're going to eat the cheaper cost.

TCAS, GPWS, etc aren't there because "Airlines for America" (the former ATA) love us, it's because it was either mandated or safety < liability.
 
Doug Taylor said:
Oh yeah.

Listen to Aviation Safety Professor Bill Waldock of ERAU talk about why he didn't fly on the DC-10.

It was less expensive to, for a period of time, absorb lawsuits from "hull losses" than it was to fix some of the primary components of the aircraft with known problems.

Sadly when it comes to safety, if safety cost > liability cost, well, they're going to eat the cheaper cost.

TCAS, GPWS, etc aren't there because "Airlines for America" (the former ATA) love us, it's because it was either mandated or safety < liability.
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Wild Bill has a extensive criteria of where he won't sit on an airplane, and he refuses to use the heat in any light airplane. He is the man though.

Safety is never the number one priority, if it was then we wouldn't fly airplanes.
 
Champcar said:
Safety is never the number one priority, if it was then we wouldn't fly airplanes.
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The point is to make money. Revenue generation is the overarching purpose of moving the aircraft and the existence of the whole business. That's why they put all those seats back there. It's pretty tough to make money if you're crashing more frequently than Hewa Bora Airways, since passengers like to be reasonably assured they'll get to their destination when they buy a ticket. (That's the other point.)

For pilots, flight attendants and anyone else directly involved in flight operations, safety is in fact job one. I can say we do a good job as evidenced (partially) from the lack of airframes falling from the sky.

Doug Taylor said:
Sadly when it comes to safety, if safety cost > liability cost, well, they're going to eat the cheaper cost.

TCAS, GPWS, etc aren't there because "Airlines for America" (the former ATA) love us, it's because it was either mandated or safety < liability.
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I would even say that WE aren't there because A4A/ATA love us... ;)
 
Doug Taylor said:
TCAS, GPWS, etc aren't there because "Airlines for America" (the former ATA) love us, it's because it was either mandated or safety < liability.
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Oh now that's not true! Lookit you pilots flying-around with all packs going and popping the reversers on almost every landing, like a drunken sailor.
 
As stated, the name of the game is risk management. The airlines do want to be safe and nobody is saying that the loss of even a single life is acceptable, but it is also known that at a certain point the cost for small incremental increases in safety go up very quickly with very little ROI. Going from a chance of an accident of 10^-9th to 10^-10th adds a LOT of money to the cost, much more than going from 10^-2 to 10^-9th likely does. That is in none of our best interests.

Many things that A4A has adopted have been voluntary. However, some things were mandated. TCAS is one. While it is a great SA tool, the truth is that the risk of a midair in the U.S. when under ATC control is very, very low. Despite the RA's, the probability is actually not that high that those "close calls" would have ended up in accidents. Just because Congress thinks something is a good idea does not make it so. They tend to go after things that have very little benefit. Airbags are a case in point.
 
As Seagull said, unfortunately safety does have a cost and sometimes spending money on safety can actually increase the mortality rate. An example of this is the debate over forcing infants to ride in safety seats on airliners and not their parents' laps. A study was done and, based on airline safety the benefit of enacting this rule would save maybe one child every eight years or so. However, by enforcing this more parents would not be able to afford to travel by air and would be forced to travel by auto- a more hazardous form of transportation. Forcing parents to travel by automobile by increasing the cost of air travel would increase the highway mortality rate of infants and more than offset the number saved by forcing them to use safety seats on airliners.
Everyone does cost/safety analysis in their own lives. When we purchase cars we factor in safety, but there gets to be a point where the average consumer compromises safety for cost in a car purchase. When we purchase a home we do the same. Does it make sense for someone in Arizona to have their home built to withstand a hurricane? Does everyone install fire sprinkler systems in their houses? Of course not.
Unfortunately we sometimes get emotional and throw our collective money at areas which result in small decreases in mortality when the money might be better spent in other areas where safety improvements would have a greater impact.
 
"If it's cheaper to save you, they'll save you. If it's cheaper to kill you, they'll kill you."

:)
 
Blackhawk said:
throw our collective money at areas which result in small decreases in mortality when the money might be better spent in other areas where safety improvements would have a greater impact.
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Like the following:

From Patient Safety: A Human Factors Approach, by Sidney Dekker. (Boca Raton, London, New
York: CRC Press. 2011).

Every flight of fatal flight for some

Put the numbers on iatrogenic harm in another context. After a flight from, say, New York to
Miami, with an airplane that carried 150 passengers, only 148 emerge alive. Two have died
simply because they were on the airplane. The flight alone caused a heart attack in one and
turbulence-induced blunt-force head trauma in another. Four have developed infections because
of being packed inside the hypoxic tube with bad air filtration and cabin crew who refused to
wash their hands before serving snacks. Two of these infections are beyond the reach of
antibiotics and will debilitate these people for life. One of these passengers has no choice:
he will have to remain on board the airplane for the rest of his life. Two passengers have
been poisoned by badly mixed $7 cocktails, which caused permanent liver damage in one and
stripped the stomach lining of the other. One has lost a leg from the hip down unnecessarily
because he got trapped in the seat in front, another passenger had her common bile duct severed
by a snagged seatbelt, and yet another suffered permanent brain damage because of oxygen supply
problems near her seat. One child was electrocuted because of the short in the entertainment
electronic circuit board mounted by her left ankle. Now, imagine the arrivals hall. What would
the scene look like? Passengers are stumbling out in various states of disability and disease.
Some are never going to come out. And this is not just one flight. It happens in every
flight, every day, by every airline. Who would still fly?

End Quotation--From Patient Safety: A Human Factors Approach, by Sidney Dekker. (Boca Raton,
London, New York: CRC Press. 2011). pp. 33-34.

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A page later (p. 35) he makes another good illustration by comparing the risk of a doctor to an
average gun owner. He says, in conclusion, "up to one in seven doctors will kill a patient
each year by mistake." By comparison, only 1 in about 53,000 gun owners will kill someone by
accident. "A doctor is 7,500 times more likely than gun owners to kill someday as a result of
human error."
 
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