Revisiting, A new FAA safety standard?
The NTSB reports that air travel is safer than automobile travel
Revisiting, this article in light of recent incidents in aviation, read more to why comparing Air travel to other forms of transportation, might not be appropriate.
While in flight, part of the fuselage of a Boeing 737 Max 9 airplane operated by Alaska Airlines failed catastrophically on 5 January 2024.1 The part that failed is a “plug” bolted in the fuselage where an optional door can be located. An emergency landing was successfully completed with some passenger injuries. All have been medically cleared.
In a recent news conference regarding the Boeing 737 Max 9 door plug failure, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairperson, Jennifer Homendy, stated that air travel is much safer than automobile travel. She went on to note that approximately 49,000 traffic fatalities occur annually in automobile travel. It seems this statement is at a minimum disingenuous but more importantly dangerous when coming from the regulator’s point of view. For example, if the standard of 49,000 deaths annually becomes the standard for air travel, ignoring fatalities on the ground, this would amount to roughly a little over 300 fatal airplane accidents per year assuming about 150 passengers were aboard. That is, airplane accidents almost daily with 150 passenger deaths. Obviously, this is an unacceptable rate of fatal commercial aircraft accidents.
A casual comparison of 49,000 annual traffic fatalities (another NTSB responsibility) against air travel safety is simply disingenuous.
The primary point here is that the regulator should not be aiming to judge safety based on fatalities in their regulated sector. Instead, they should be mindful of events that could lead to fatal accidents or have led to fatal accidents and perform root cause analysis and efficacious actions to remove such events in the future. In the case of the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 event, on two occasions cabin air pressure warnings occurred but no root cause was determined and the plane continued to fly although it was restricted to flights over land rather than overseas flights.
It is my opinion that regulators are responsible in their own sector of regulation to judge the level of safety based on alternative approaches. In the case of the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 event, it would be safer commercial air travel if after the first flight that had a cabin pressurization warning—that is, before the flight when the plug blew out— the aircraft was kept on the ground. While on the ground the root cause for the unexpected and unknown causes for the cabin depressurization events could have been safely determined and corrected.
Safety and the regulator’s responsibility for risk management
Regulation is required to maintain the US commercial aviation safety record. Regulators who inspect and enforce safety regulations and standards must be proactive on their own initiative even though they may not be as expert as the aircraft manufacturer. That is, an unexpected and unexplained cabin pressure alarm is not an indication of safety and understanding it indicates an unsafe condition only requires common sense.
Although commercial aircraft are designed with substantial safety factors, regulators must understand that taking advantage of safety factors to justify continued operation where a design deviation has been reported is unacceptable. Design deviations within a safety factor do not form a basis for asserting safe operation. Instead, such deviations indicate unsafe operation.2
Citizens should be concerned that NTSB regulators have failed to use common sense in at least two Boeing Max design events—one is the Alaska Airlines door plug event where cabin pressure deviation warnings were ignored prior to the catastrophic door plug failure, and ignoring several aircraft control failures prior to two fatal accidents.3 We can do better.
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See: Investigation of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. Although the NTSB agreed to disallowing overseas flight on the aircraft that had cabin pressurization warnings, it nevertheless allowed the aircraft to continue domestic service.