Air travel is about the safest form of travel there is. But the whole approach to aviation safety is totally different to that to road safety.
Imagine if air accidents invoked the same response as road accidents.
If an air accident (or even an incident) happens, an independant team of investigators will go to work, not to establish blame , or find someone to give a ticket to, but to objectively and scientifically determine WHY the accident occured.
They assume that nobody WANTS to crash, so if an accident happened it was because something went wrong. Equipment failure? Procedural defect? Human error ? and why? Fatigue? Inadequate training? etc .Once they have determined the cause(s) they formulate responses to prevent such accidents in the future .
How very different to road accidents, where a policeman conducts a cursory investigation, directed not at finding the cause (because that is invariably assigned as either speed or alcohol ) but rather to gather evidence to charge someone with something. So long as a prosecution results, noone cares if anything is done to prevent future accidents.
What if air accident investigation followed the same process ?
Pilot Officer Prune brings the 747 in to land too fast, on a wet runway in the dark. P O Prune qualified on 747s 30 years ago (easy enough, its only a scratch and win test and a half hour observed flight), but until today has only flown Cessnas. He hasn't had any briefing on 747s but vaguely remembers someone telling him the approach speed (though he's got it wrong). The control tower is unmanned, the government decided to save some money. Half the runway lights don't work, and there are some big potholes in the runway.
P O Prune does his best in the landing , but he's 50 knots too fast. One wheel hits a pothole , the plane slews, P O Prune jams on the brakes (no-one ever taught him how to deal with emergencies, his whole training was only 10 hours long) ; a wheel locks in the wet, the plane slews and leaves the runway, and clips a building. Several people are injured , one seriously.
A policeman arrives to investiagte. he determines that P O Prune was not drunk, and that therefore the crash must be caused by excessive speed. He charges P O Prune with dangerous flying, and he loses his licence. The police call for an immediate reduction of in flight aircraft speeds to a maximum of 200 knots.
Absurd, isnt it. yet's that's EXACTLY how we approach road accidents.
Is it not time that the repsonsibility for accident investigation (and determining who if anyone should be prosecuted) was removed form the police. They don't take it seriously, and do a piss poor job of it. An independant Road Accident Investigation department might make a big difference.
(Cross posted to the Safeas forum)
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