Effort Launched to Reduce Global Accident Rate by One-Quarter

Safety seen as central to avoiding the rocky shoals of financial disaster

The accident rate for the aviation industry must be reduced as a matter of maintaining public confidence in the safety of air travel and as a cost-saving measure in financially-troubled times, according to industry officials.

“While we as an industry have made remarkable strides in the reduction of an already low accident rate, we cannot accept – and will not accept – that there is anything like an endemic rate of airline accidents,” declared Capt. Ed Davidson, director of safety for the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

Some 270 airlines providing 98 percent of revenue passenger miles globally comprise IATA’s membership. As a general statement, those airlines are experiencing tough times, Davidson said. Despite modest improvement in fiscal fortunes in the third quarter of this year, “the industry is on track to lose a record amount of money and substantial market capitalization in 2003,” Davidson said.

“Passenger traffic is still down one percent overall, and the largest passenger market in the world, North America, remains essentially stagnant.

Since the 9/11 attacks, the industry has lost $25 billion, with 60 percent increases in insurance and security costs. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have disappeared. “We risk running aground on the shoals of financial disaster,” Davidson added, to flesh out the grim picture.

John Lauber, president of the International Federation of Airworthiness (IFA) and a senior Airbus executive, said that with war, terrorism, the parlous state of the global economy, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and all the other plagues of misfortune competing for attention, “We have to stay focused on safety.”

As an example, he said, “Equipping airlines with missile defense systems will cost billions of dollars, but the loss of one airplane will cost our industry billions of dollars.”

Fundamental safety questioned

Davidson said, “For the first time in our history, we have passengers and governments actively questioning the underlying precept that they have previously come to expect as a given – that air travel is fundamentally safe.”

Davidson, Lauber, and other top industry officials were speaking at a safety conference last week organized by the Flight Safety Foundation.

To seize the initiative, to ensure that the fragile confidence in the safety of air travel is restored to a higher degree of confidence, IATA has launched an effort to reduce the jet transport accident rate 25 percent by 2006, as expressed in hull losses. More specifically, that goal would reduce the accident rate from the present figure of 0.72 accidents per million flights to 0.54 accidents per million flights.

“This goal is achievable and, in fact, must be achieved,” Davidson declared.

The IATA goal ought to be placed in context. The joint industry-Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) effort, the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST), set for itself the goal of reducing the fatal accident rate for scheduled U.S. airlines by 80 percent, and to achieve that goal by 2007. The CAST measure of merit is in terms of fatal accidents, which are not the same thing as the hull loss metric employed by IATA (not all hull losses are fatal accidents). The CAST goal, measured in terms of accidents per million flights, works out to 0.27. Thus, the IATA goal reflects an accident rate about twice as high as the major safety effort under way in the U.S. However, IATA is hoping to achieve its goal in four years, whereas the CAST program is working over a 10-year period. Moreover, the IATA effort is dealing with much greater variability among its member carriers.

IATA hopes to achieve its goal through a series of structured reviews of practices and policies at its member airlines. These are known as IATA operational safety audits (IOSA), two of which have been completed already this year and more of which are scheduled.

Davidson explained, “IOSA is designed to simplify the process and reduce the cost to our members of the often regulatory-required code-share audit process, as well as to provide a fundamental level of safety to which all IATA members have subscribed by the end of 2006.”

IATA hopes to achieve the 25 percent accident rate reduction by having safety management systems in place for half of its member carriers by 2006. Significantly, the audits are but one part of a battery of complementary action-oriented safety programs that are being launched. Dubbed the “Six Segments of Safety,” they include:

Safety auditing, as exemplified by IOSA. Two done; four more slated for completion in the next six months.

Infrastructure safety, including air traffic management and airports. “The high rate of airside accidents is a drain and it’s growing worse every year,” Davidson said. “We have to take a systems approach to ground damage just as we have applied it to the analysis and prevention of airborne accidents.”

FSF President Stuart Matthews estimated that some 200 people are killed annually in ground accidents. “Countless more are injured,” he added. He placed the cost of these ramp accidents at some $5 billion. “That’s $5 billion in costs going straight out the door,” Matthews lamented. His estimates show that the human and financial costs of ramp accidents globally are much worse than the somber picture painted recently by the FAA’s Robert Matthews (no relation) of the cost of ramp accidents in the United States (see ASW, Oct. 6).

Safety data management. This element of the program includes flight data monitoring and voluntary pilot reporting. “We know that to improve safety we need to be data driven,” Davidson said. “Two years ago we launched STEADES (Safety Trend Evaluation and Data Exchange System), but we are not gathering and analyzing other vital data from important sources – particularly data recorders.”

Since information sharing is essential, IATA has begun publishing a Safety Intelligence Bulletin. “This electronic publication keeps a running tab on the state of the accident rate industry-wide,” Davidson explained.

Safety training. The crew resource management (CRM) course has been revamped. More emphasis will be placed on English as the primary aviation language.

Cabin safety. New in 2004, this initiative will focus on the prevention of injuries to flight attendants and passengers.

Cargo safety, with an emphasis on cargo loading, given instances where cargo aircraft were loaded outside of the weight and balance limits.

If the CAST effort is any indicator, the IATA safety initiative promises to save its member airlines more money in mishaps and accidents avoided than it will cost to increase the overall level of safety. Having said that, discussions at the FSF symposium last week reveal that the vaunted 80 percent goal established for CAST is now considered too expensive to achieve. (See ASW, Nov. 20, 2000, and April 2, 2001) Rather, reducing the goal from an 80 percent improvement to a 73 percent reduction in the accident rate is considered more cost effective.

Implementing the 84 programs identified to reduce the fatal accident rate 80 percent would cost an estimated $5 billion – a huge sum in these economically difficult times. However, implementing 46 identified safety initiatives could achieve a 73 percent reduction in the fatal accident rate for an estimated one-time cost of roughly $500 million.

Implementing those 46 initiatives would save the industry an estimated $620 million per year, every year into the future. Indeed, CAST officials have broken down the cost savings per flight. Presently they estimate that the current accident rate costs the U.S. airline industry about $76 per flight. If the accident rate can be cut 73 percent, the costs would be reduced some $56 dollars per flight, down to $20 per flight.

Instead of accident-related money coming off the bottom line, the $620 million in savings would accrue for years on end, well beyond the $500 million investment to implement the CAST initiatives.

John Marshall, vice president of safety at Delta Air Lines [NYSE: DAL] and a senior member of the CAST effort, says the favorable cost-benefit from operating more safely is evident. “Safety is good for business. It can be shown,” he declared. >> Davidson, e-mail [email protected] <<