 Analyzing aviation safety: Problems, challenges, opportunitiesClinton V. Oster, John S. Strong and C. Kurt Zorn Research in Transportation Economics, 2013, vol. 43, issue 1, 148-164 Abstract: This paper reviews the economic literature relating to aviation safety; analyzes the safety record of commercial passenger aviation in the United States and abroad; examines aviation security as a growing dimension of aviation safety; and identifies emerging issues in airline safety and challenges for aviation safety research. Commercial airline safety has improved dramatically since the industry's birth over a century ago. Fatal accident rates for large scheduled jet airlines have fallen to the level where (along many dimensions) aviation is now the safest mode of commercial transportation. However, safety performance has not been evenly distributed across all segments of commercial aviation, nor among all countries and regions of the world. The finding that developing countries have much poorer safety records has been a persistent conclusion in aviation safety research and continues to be the case. Unfortunately, operations data are not available for many of the airlines that experience fatal accidents, so it is not possible to calculate reliable fatality rates for many segments of the worldwide aviation industry. Without more complete information, it will likely be difficult to make substantial improvements in the safety of these operations. Challenges to improving aviation security include: how much to focus on identifying the terrorists as opposed to identifying the tools they might use; determining how to respond to terrorist threats; and determining the public versus private roles in providing aviation security. The next generation of safety challenges now require development and understanding of new forms of data to improve safety in other segments of commercial aviation, and moving from a reactive, incident-based approach toward a more proactive, predictive and systems-based approach. Keywords: Aviation safety; Aviation security; Aviation terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:retrec:v:43:y:2013:i:1:p:148-164 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1016/j.retrec.2012.12.001 Access Statistics for this article Research in Transportation Economics is currently edited by M. Dresner More articles in Research in Transportation Economics from Elsevier |
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