Q: I’ve read that the fatality rate per mile traveled on a commercial plane is much lower than it is when traveling by car. Are there things we could learn from the airlines on how to make our roads safer?
A: There are numerous resources comparing commercial airline safety with driving, and every one of them reaches the same conclusion you stated in your question: Commercial flight is safe. Really safe. In the last seven years no one has died on a US-certificated scheduled commercial airline. Looking back, in 1924, at the dawn of the commercial flight era, airline fatalities were at one death for every 13,500 miles traveled (or 7407 deaths per 100 million miles). In 1960, commercial airlines had a fatality rate of 44 deaths per 100 million miles. In 2015 US airlines flew 7.6 billion miles with a total of, you guessed it, no fatalities.
Meanwhile, traffic deaths have not seen such dramatic declines, and in the past two year have actually increased. I’ll admit that pitting commercial flights against driving a personal vehicle isn’t an equivalent comparison, but there are a few similarities. Both flying and driving started with minimal restrictions; laws and rules were established once people saw the deadly consequences cause by a lack of standards. Both flying and driving became safer as manufacturers were held to higher standards with engineering and safety equipment, and as pilots and drivers were held to higher levels of training. But why did commercial airlines reach the point of practically zero deaths, while on public highways over 35,000 people died last year?
To get some clues, I looked into the history of aviation safety. The government’s original role in aviation safety wasn’t as a regulator, but as an airline operator; in the late teens and 1920’s government-owned planes, flown by government-employed pilots, delivered the US mail. The comparatively high standards for training and maintenance resulted in a safety record 58 times better than other commercial flights.
As the airline industry grew, the federal government took on the role of regulator, working with airlines to improve safety. Both airlines and the government knew that for commercial flight to be successful, the public had to trust that it would be safe. Over the course of 100 years, flying became progressively safer. Many of the improvements to commercial airline safety came from “tombstone engineering”; figuring out what went wrong in a disaster and changing the rules or designs to prevent it in the future.
Changes to traffic law, vehicle design and road engineering have progressed similarly. If both flight and driving started out with poor safety records, and both made changes to improve safety, I’ll ask again: Why did commercial flight in the US become a nearly zero-risk mode of transportation, while driving has stagnated at around 35,000 deaths per year?
One reason may be that we’re making the wrong comparison. Individual drivers are regulated more at the level of private pilots, while commercial flight might better be compared to trains or buses. Commercial transportation, whether in the air or on the ground, is held to a higher standard than private transportation, and apparently, that affects fatality rates. The fatality rate for private flight is, depending on which study you read, somewhat more or a bit less than driving in a car. Either way, it’s far riskier than getting on a commercial plane. Like driving, fatalities from general aviation (non-commercial flight) are mostly from human error.
Within the general aviation community there is a movement toward better training, more frequent proficiency checks and better safety systems for pilots. Efforts like these, applied to drivers, might make our roads safer. Experts in the airline industry attribute the higher commercial pilot standards to much of the success in commercial flight safety.
Ultimately, fatality rates change based on what we’re willing to accept. Are we as drivers willing to require more training to be issued a driver license? How about a periodic test to make sure we still know the rules of the road? That seems reasonable to me. Currently, as long as you can pass a vision test and pay $45 you’re good for five more years. You could drive for seventy years or more and never have to demonstrate any driving proficiency once the initial license was issued. Think about how driving has changed over the last decades and tell me that doesn’t seem a little crazy.
Commercial transportation has established higher standards and training for pilots and drivers, resulting in significantly less fatalities. Are we willing to do that on an individual level? Until the robot cars take over for us, that’s what it’s going to take to move the needle on traffic fatalities.
Thank you for yet another insightful, interesting, thought-provoking and important article on highway safety. It is disturbing how we’ve become jaded enough to such high rates of death and debilitating injury to be willing to accept 35,000 deaths (and half a million serious injuries) annually on our roads as “business as usual” or “the cost of doing business”. Thanks to advanced technology that makes driving so easy, almost effortless, smooth and quiet; we live in ignorance of just how big, powerful, fast, polluting and dangerous our cars are. Try, as I do, using a bicycle for 95% of your transportation needs over 35 years. Outside but in frighteningly close proximity to the hundreds of motor vehicles that whiz by your elbow inches or a few feet away everyday never lets you forget. Without the false security of the steel, plastic and glass bubble cocooning you; I can tell you with striking certainty that several tons of car mass hurtling about at speeds of 35 to 75 miles per hour is a frightening, noisy, smelly, dangerous and deadly intrusion and threat to our environment and our well-being. But the car has been sold so heavily over the past decade as the uber desirable, indispensable experience; I doubt much public or political interest in the types of increased control and regulation of driver behavior you suggest or allude to will ever gain much traction. Convenience, “freedom” and status trump safety.