Time-evolving distribution of time lags between commercial airline disasters

Marcel Ausloos and R. Lambiotte

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2006, vol. 362, issue 2, 513-524

Abstract: We have studied the time lags between commercial line airplane disasters and their occurrence frequency till 2002, as obtained from a freely available website. We show that the time lags seem to be well described by Poisson random events, where the average events rate is itself a function of time, i.e., time-dependent Poisson events. This is likely due to the unsteady growth of the industry. The time lag distribution is compared with a truncated Tsallis distribution, thereby showing that the “phenomenon” has similarities with a Brownian particle with time-dependent mass. We distinguish between “other causes” (or natural causes) and “terrorism acts”, the latter amounts to about 5%, but we find no drastic difference nor impact due to the latter on the overall distribution.

Keywords: Poisson distribution; Exponential distribution; Tsallis distribution; Airline flight crashes; Terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:362:y:2006:i:2:p:513-524

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2005.09.058

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