It’s been a bad year so far for airline crashes, and it may be hard to keep that number down in the future, according to The Wall Street Journal Thursday.
In a story headlined “The Difficulty in Improving Air Safety Now,” The Journal reports that there have been 13 fatal crashes of passenger airlines through August this year, compared with 10 crashes for all of last year.
And the 13 figure for this year doesn’t include military and private-plane fatal crashes.
But the gist of the story is that there may not be many more air safety improvements that can be made, that in fact these measures may “be bottoming out,” as The Journal put it.
I don’t know if I agree with that thesis, but the story contains a wealth of information and statistics about plane crashes.
Perhaps not surprisingly, most crashes occur when a plane is taking off or attempting to land.
And regional airlines score have much worse safety records than larger aircraft, “involved in five of the seven fatal accidents on scheduled airline flights in the past 10 years,” The Journal wrote, citing data from the National Transportation Safety Board.
Plane crashes have multiple causes, and about 80 percent of the time they involve human error; about 50 percent have causes like bad weather; and 20 percent of the time there is something wrong with the plane, according to The Journal.