Originally Posted by
Nevjets
Listen to what you are saying. If you drove home buzzed without wearing your seatbelt 40 million times, that would be safe. No matter how many times or how little it was done, it wasn’t safe. The probability of it happening is low. But being safe isn’t about probabilities. You operate safely or you don’t. A flight doesn’t start with you asking yourself, what are statistics I’ll make it without incident? It’s 1 in 40 million, therefore my flight will be safe. That’s backwards.
When people say safety isn’t outcome based, it’s boiling it down to its essence. It’s to say that safety isn’t just a yes/no issue. It’s more than just binary. Or in other words, it’s not just, did we crash or not? That would be outcome based. Having a safe flight isn’t just about having an accident or not. You guys are getting hung up on sample size in the hypothetical to illustrate the point. Sure, statistics is an easy way to quantify safety but defining safety isn’t a discussion about statistics.
Safety is absolutely about statistics. How else can you make objective analyses about your actions and their impact on safety?
If, in this example, you showed that people could drive home drunk without a seatbelt
40 million times, that is absolutely an indicator of it being safe.
This job isn’t about
100% safety. If it was, we’d never leave the gate unless it was calm, clear, both 15,000 hour pilots had 18 hours rest in the ritz Carlton, had a good workout and a preflight EKG and there were no MEL’s on the airplane. Boeing would never build a Frankenstein airplane full of compromises to maintain a common type. Engine and other maintenance work wouldn’t be outsourced to Colombia.
It’s about acceptable levels of safety and risk management, concepts that require outcome based statistics to successfully analyze.
Another example- common sense would be that a pilot with spin training is less likely to die in a spin related accident than one without.
Turns out pilots would get spin training and then would kill themselves while practicing. The FAA, through the use of accident statistics, discovered this and mandated that spin training was no longer mandatory. Spin related fatalities went
down.
Who’d have thought, without statistics, that less training would equal safer flying?