Tag: Aviation

Is aviation safety shameful thing: Final summary

Safety is an important part of aviation. Although many customers do not care, we feel that it should be transparent to those customers who are. Studying airline web pages showed large variations between airlines, but to summarize: it appears to us that the majority of airlines want their ordinary passengers to think of flying as a non-technical activity that entails no risk, and hence no need for safety measures.

However, some airlines do go to significant depths about their safety procedures. Many of those airlines are in developing countries with poor safety records, and appear to use safety as a marketing tool to reassure customers. However, some well-known Western airlines also have a similar approach. In essence, we found no external parameters that would explain the differences.

We interpret this to mean that safety can be used as a marketing tool. Some airlines choose to use it; some do not. Nothing external forces an airline to be transparent or opaque about its safety culture; rather, this is a (business) decision that is made by the company.

Three aspects were studied (see also full project page).
Report 1. Do airlines make safety information available to their users on their main web pages? (By Jakke Mäkelä)
Report 2. Do airline web pages have any mention of accidents or incidents that have happened? (By Niko Porjo)
Report 3. Is there any external factor that would systematically explain any differences? (By Niko Porjo)

Report 1: The web sites of 83 major airlines were analyzed. Only 35% seem willing to even mention safety on their official web pages (what we decided to call a “safety-positive” approach towards customers). Airlines in developing countries were more safety-positive; up to 65% of them used safety as a marketing tool. However, this was not a hard-and-fast rule; some developed-nation airlines like British Airways and All Nippon Airways had a very large focus on safety issues.

Report 2: The web pages of 46 airlines were scanned in detail to see whether any information at all could be found about accidents that had occurred to the airlines. Out of 37 airlines with a fatal accident, 10 mentioned the accident somewhere on the web page. However, the information was technically quite shallow.

Report 3: A simple metric was used, where number of hits on a search for keywords “safety” and “accident” was used as a proxy for the amount of accident information that the airline wishes to make available. This number was correlated with a number of internal parameters that could affect it (such as airline size), as well as external parameters such as the GDP and Global Integrity Report score of the carrier country. No statistically significant correlations were found.

The overall impression is that for any ordinary passenger ordering a ticket and browsing around the web site, the majority of airlines do not wish to bring up the issue of safety in any way. The factors that are emphasized are price and quality. When anything more is described, it is positive things like social responsibility, equal opportunity, sponsorships, and  so on. However, there is a dichotomy: those airlines that do mention safety tend to do so extensively.

Those are fairly objective facts; what personal opinions should we draw from them? We are rather surprised that so few airlines choose to be open about safety. Silence on this issue does not benefit the customers. Customers should be able to make informed choices, and this includes understanding the safety record of the airline.

Perhaps it does not benefit the airlines either.  In a culture of silence, safety only becomes visible when disaster strikes. The easiest way for an outsider to understand the airline’s safety culture is to read accident investigation reports on how it failed. This is hardly positive advertising. Would it be possible for airlines to utilize their safety culture in a more proactive way?

Accident information comparisons

 

Safety and accident related information is available at the websites of airlines, but you will find more of it if you use Google. There were also a couple of interesting peculiarities in the data, where it seems possible that the airline was hiding information. See also Part 1, this post is part of our “Is aviation safety a shameful thing?” project.

In this part two I will compare the number of safety/accident related links that were found by the airline’s own search to the number found by Google when it was limited to the website in question. Both link counts are also analyzed against against information about the airlines and their home countries. The intention is to find out how open airlines are with this information. Absolute numbers show how much information is available, relative numbers show how well it can be found with the search provided by the airline and might give a hint about how desirable it is to the airline to show that information. Comparison with other data might reveal factors that are common to airlines with high or low number of links.

I searched through 46 airlines. Figure 1 shows the raw link counts. The x-axis shows how many links were found and the y-axis shows the number of airlines that had that count. The large blue and orange bars at x=0 show that for many airlines the homepage was a poor choice for finding safety or accident info.

On the other hand Google is able to find information (yellow and green bars) on both subjects and in some cases quite a lot of it. It should be noted that I only counted to 10, if there were more links I ignored them. This document of the raw data shows in more detail which links were accepted to this data set.

Links to anything that the passengers would find out during the trip, such as pre-flight safety announcements, were rejected. Another category that was not accepted were links to insurance terms and conditions.The reason being that I am interested in what “extra” information is available at the website.

Figure 1. Number of links found for both searches and words.

I’d like to be a little cautious when making conclusions based on this data, mainly due to the low number of airlines, but also due to the data gathering process. Namely it was done by me alone without much help. In my experience this leads to a less rigorous result than a group effort. But one thing seems to be pretty certain: Google is better in finding this information than the search functions on the airline web sites.

This is true even if those 12 airlines that didn’t have a search are removed from the zero column. For the whole set, when the number of links found for one airline by one search is summed; Google finds more links in 39 cases while in only two cases the homepage search returns more results (Qantas 5 vs. 4 and Czech Airlines 7 vs. 5)

At least one of the airlines uses Google to power their search (US Airways). This offers an interesting comparison: US Airways homepage search found 3 safety and 1 accident related link, while the general google search found 1 safety and 7 accident related links.

While I was not logged in to my Google account, it is possible that Google had picked up on the fact that the same computer had been intensely searching for accident info for several days and used this knowledge to show what was most interesting to me.

A more sinister explanation is that the results by the search provided at the homepage have been filtered not to include what I was looking for. Searching the US airways site with the site’s search for “1549” gives (18 March 2012 ) one result about a general chronology of the airline and tells that some results have been omitted. If one includes those, four more links to the same chronology are included. It is still possible that this is a result of some more general decision not to include parts of the web site in the site search, but I’d say there is a good possibility that this is intentional.

In the case of Kenya Airways, Google search gave two links to the accident of KQ 507 but when I followed those links they gave a 404 (i.e page not found). This could be due to several reasons and need not be intentional. The accident was mentioned in an annual report.

Table 1. Mean and median number of links found Google for different sub populations

 

Table 1 shows the mean and median number of links found by google for different sub populations. “Whole set” includes all the airlines, while “Google and Homepage” includes only those cases where both searches were available and “Google only” includes only the cases where there was no homepage search.

In all cases there are more links related to safety than to accidents, but the difference is not massive. Results for the word “Safety” show no definite differences between the populations. For “Accident” airlines with their own search show more info. This difference could be explained if the airlines with no homepage search had had fewer accidents, but in only 3 cases out of 12 I couldn’t find a fatal accident in the history of the airline. Four out of the 12 airlines without homepage search function are low cost airlines which might have less expansive websites and therefore less information. This result is similar to what Jakke saw in his analysis of airline homepages.

I compared the link counts against a data set ( or here ) with info on

  • number of employees
  • number of yearly passengers
  • revenue
  • year the airline was founded
  • GDP (PPP) per capita of the airlines home country
  • global integrity report overall score of home country
  • corruption perception index
  • IATA membership
  • date of latest accident

It was difficult to find all the data for all the airlines so there are some gaps. The data is also unreferenced and from various sources. Some plots with very short description are available here. There is a modest correlation between the date of latest non fatal accident and total number of links found,  which just might be significant. There is also a modest correlation between the Global Integrity Report overall score and total number of links. But the plots show that in addition to the set being quite small there might be other data related difficulties that make this type of analysis less trustworthy.

Overall the small numbers in table 1 suggest that openness is not the approach chosen for these subjects. Further, there is accident related information at many airline websites but you might not find all of it with the search provided by the airline.

In the third part of this series I will attempt to rate the links and see if any info comes out of that

Aviation safety: We made a mistake and learned, or did we?

 

 

Before Jakke’s post on aviation safety we had a discussion on the likelihood of airlines documenting accidents on their web sites. I think it would be a good thing to actually show when mistakes are made. It would be especially good to show what has been learned and how the organization has responded to improve safety. That being said, we all thought that no info would be available.

To complement Jakke’s findings I searched for the most recent fatal and non-fatal accident for  a semi-random collection of airlines. I then made an attempt to find information (or at least some reference) to those accidents on the web pages of the respective airlines. I mainly used Wikipedia as a source of accident dates since it is easy to use, fairly trustworthy and also lists non-fatal accidents for many airlines. If nothing was found for an airline, I tried googling a bit to check if it was likely that there had actually been no accidents. Altogether I went through info on 46 airlines.

Contrary to what we thought, information is  available. Sometimes cases that took place before ARPANET was functional can be found. In the figure below, each of the accidents I found is shown with a dot at the year it happened. The count goes up each time I was able to find the accident in the web site of the airline. As can be seen, most of the references were found when the accident date was after the year 2000 (steep slope at the end). This is natural if the web site is not considered to be a repository.

In 37 cases I found a fatal accident related to an airline, and in 10 of those cases there was a reference to that accident in the web site. This may not sound like much, but it was much more that I believed it would be. But, and there is a but, this info was not meant for customers. It isn’t very in-depth info either. It is mostly a short paragraph in a financial statement or a press release. In the figure below from left the pillars are: number of airlines that were checked for a known accident, number of airlines that had a reference to the accident, number of cases where the reference was in a financial statement, number of cases where the reference was in a press release and number of cases where the reference was somewhere else on the web site.

While I’m kind of happy that there is honesty about the fact that there are accidents and incidents, I’m disappointed at the level of technical info released. For example in only one case did I find a link to the accident investigation report, here.

While I was looking for this info I also made some other notes related to this subject, and will write more about them in another post.

Some more info and less opinions is available here, and the spreadsheet I used can be seen here. This post is part of our “Is aviation safety a shameful thing?” project.

 

Is aviation safety a shameful thing?

 

“Why do airlines stay so silent about safety issues? “

By almost any measure, flying is the safest way to move long distances. Most airlines make massive investments into safety. Yet to our surprise, we have found that it is difficult for a casual outsider to find out precisely what the airlines are doing with that invested money.  All airlines have a safety culture, yet this culture is opaque to outsiders. I found that only 35% of airlines even wish to mention safety on their web pages.

Silence certainly does not benefit the customers of an airline. Customers should be able to make informed choices, and this includes understanding the safety record. How can the average person find such information? It  doesn’t benefit the airlines either. In a culture of silence, safety only becomes visible when disaster strikes. The easiest way for an outsider to understand the airline’s safety culture is to read accident investigation reports on how it failed (from NTSB, AAIB, OTKES, SHK, BEA, and the like). This is hardly positive advertising.

I asked a simple question: just how opaque do the airlines want to be?  To answer, I went clicking through the web pages of 83 major airlines. The scanning was purposely quick, to simulate an ordinary customer who wants to know what general attitude the airline has toward safety. If a company provided concrete safety information, it was marked as “safety-positive”. Full report (pdf): Airlines are safe; why try to hide it.

I found only 35% of airlines to be safety-positive. To put it another way,  almost 65% of airlines try to downplay the role of safety, to the level of ignoring the question altogether in their communications.

I made some further analyses to determine what might lie behind this fact.  It is important to realize that the essential safety standards around the world are quite similar. All of the airlines in this sample fulfill some standards that could be legitimately used to show that there is a safety culture in place. It is very much a communications decision whether or not the airline wishes to emphasize this point.

I gave the benefit of the doubt as much as possible.  A sentence on a “safety as our priority” means nothing. However, any attempt at a more concrete desciption (even a clumsy one)  was credited. Information on engineering, maintenance, or safety-related technology was considered safety-positive even if the term “safety” was not used explicitly. Such information at least gives the impression that aviation is a technical activity requiring technical care. The analysis is not about how slick the presentation is; it is about whether a good-faith attempt is made.

This is crucial when comparing airline to airline. A poor airline may have just one page of information about the company. If that single page contains a single paragraph about the safety standards that the company follows, then the airline is safety-positive. At the other extreme, a large airline may have dozens of flashy pages on issues like corporate social responsibility, environment, and sponsorships. If such a company fails to even mention safety as a topic, it is deliberate.

The call was surprisingly easy to make. Airlines seem to either put a heavy emphasis on safety, or else avoid the topic altogether; there is not much middle ground.  The results were somewhat surprising. Only 35% of airlines even mentioned safety or technical issues. The majority essentially try to paint an image of aviation as a non-technical activity that entails no risk. Some other key findings (more extensively discussed in the report):


  • 65% of the safety-positive airlines are from developing countries with poor track records of safety. Africa and the former Soviet Union were heavily represented.  Quite clearly, concrete safety actions are clearly used to to improve trust in the airline’s safety.
  • Safety-positiveness is not just a “weapon of the weak”; large and successful airlines such as British Airways, Air Canada, Air Berlin, and All Nippon Airways all had extensive safety sections.
  • Two airlines, Garuda Indonesia and Pakistan International Airways, have briefly been on the EU blacklist of airlines banned from flying to the EU due to poor security. Interestingly, the safety sections of these airlines were among the most extensive in the sample.
  • Only 2 low-cost carriers out of 16 (12%) were safety-positive. The web page information for many low-cost carriers is extremely scanty in any case, so there may be a general attitude toward minimal communication. However, the two counterexamples (Norwegian and Pegasus) suggest that a low-cost structure does not fundamentally require such reticence; those two companies have a very strong focus on safety.
  • A striking feature is that US companies seem to be the most averse to safety-positiveness; of the 9 US companies studied, none mentioned safety at all.
  • A similar reluctance was seen in Middle Eastern companies, where only one of six companies had any safety information.

These results do not imply anything about what airlines should do; they simply point out what the airlines are currently doing. However, the scatter in the results does suggest that there is no fundamental reason to keep safety information hidden; transparency about safety is a communications and business decision.

Since the results from this initial study were so intriguing, we have launched a new Zygomatica project to find out more.

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