Flying in Third World
less safe than in First
By the Institute for Operations Research
and the Management Sciences news service
Passengers who fly in the developing world countries face 13 times the
risk of being killed in an air accident as passengers in the First
World. The more economically advanced countries in the developing world
have better overall safety records than the others, but even their
death risk per flight is seven times as high as that in First World
countries.
These statistics are among the findings in the new study "Cross
National Differences in Aviation Safety Records" by Arnold Barnett,
which appears in the current issue of Transportation Science, a journal
of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
Barnett is a professor the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and a long-term researcher on aviation safety.
Using worldwide air-safety data, Barnett calculated that, over 2000-07,
the chance of dying on a scheduled flight in a First World nation like
the United States, Japan, or Ireland was 1 in 14 million (this
statistic considers propeller planes as well as jets). At that rate, a
passenger who took one flight every day would on average go 38,000
years before succumbing to a fatal accident.
On the airlines of economically advancing countries in the developing
world such as Taiwan, India, and Brazil, the death risk per flight was
1 in 2 million. In less economically-advanced developing-world
countries, the death risk per flight was 1 in 800,000. Barnett
calculates that the risk differences in this three-group model “are not
statistically significant within groups, but are highly significant
across groups.”
All these statistics reflect major advances in safety in the last
decade, and Barnett points out that the distinction he makes is
“between safe and very safe, and not between safe and dangerous.”
Indeed, Barnett notes that “it is not uncommon for a month to pass
without any fatal passenger-jet crashes anywhere in the world.”
While the study ends in 2007, the patterns it depicts continue to
persist. So far in 2010, there have been eight fatal accidents on
scheduled passenger flights. All eight of them occurred in the
developing world.
Prof. Barnett questioned why the economically-advancing countries in
the developing world did not have safety records closer to those in the
First World, given that they approach First-World standards in life
expectancy and per capita income. He cites research that indicates
that, in terms of deference to authority and “individualism,” the
economically advancing developing-world countries are on average far
from those in the First World but almost identical to other
developing-world countries.
Barnett concedes that he should not get too caught up in speculation
but notes that one possible explanation for why the
economically-advancing countries did not fare better is that “their
economic shift towards the First World has not been accompanied by a
corresponding cultural shift.”
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