Originally Posted by DarkSideMoon

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?