Reply #10: Safefy first... [View All]

[mcscajun]

From Patrick Smith "Ask the Pilot" on Salon.com:

For airline A to sell itself as safer than everyone else, there needs to be a presumption of danger aboard its competitors. This would entail some dubious statistical maneuvering. In the United States, approximately one of every 2.3 million commercial departures will be involved in some type of accident, whether minor or catastrophic. Distributing the data airline to airline, the odds do change, but only barely. Since the terror attacks of 2001, American Airlines has had one fatal accident; the other network carriers none. It would be shamelessly underhanded, if mathematically accurate, for United or Delta to promote themselves a better bet than American.

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Protocol permits any airline to call itself safe. Just not safer.

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Just because an airline doesn't showboat its safety initiatives doesn't mean they don't exist. Cynics will be eager to cite a seeming trail of greed and criminal negligence: airlines ruled culpable for certain crashes, maintenance practices occasionally found suspect, and so on. But I hasten to remind you how much a carrier stands to lose should one of its planes go down. To suggest that the industry, along with its federal overseers, is playing fast and loose with the lives of the traveling public is a terrible distortion.