Reactivity

I've seen a couple of relatively low-time captains who have been OK. But there's a reason ATI poached ABX's safety guy.

TripleIsolation

Probably to deal with all of the old timers taking out taxi way lights

Elevation

ABX has gone more than ten years without an NTSB-rated accident. They've flown many, many departures in that time. There's something they're doing right even with abysmal morale.

No Land 3

Huge difference between accident and incident. Only one to have an accident in the last 10 years is Atlas.

6Badger9

You sure about that?

NeverHome

If you are referencing the part about accident/incident then yes a big difference. Incidents happen all the time. Accidents are much less common. But I suspect you already knew that so...

If your referencing the accident in the last 10 years- atlas was the only fatal 121 cargo accident that I’m aware of. However this year 2019 alone we have had Miami air, commutair, pennair (with a fatality) and a host of other mishaps I’m probably not aware of and some I am.

Elevation

ATI had one in Japan back in 2011. I think it was a passenger injury or something like that which crossed the line and was rated as an accident. ABX did have one more than ten years ago. The difference is that ABX has logged many more departures than ATI over the same timeframe.

And, yes, there is a huge difference between accidents and incidents. That's why I'm referring to accidents. Accidents meet NTSB 830 standards and normalize for company to company differences in reporting, etc.

ABX hasn't had an accident in the last ten years. In 2018 they had a rolling 10 year average of 245k departures per accident. Those numbers extrapolated would currently have them averaging about 210k departures/accident over the last ten years. (This is due to the fact that ABX is flying a lot less than they used to so they are demonstrating fewer reliable departures as their busy history moves more than a decade into the past.) ATI is averaging about about 97k departures/accident. Atlas is around 84k departures per accident with 4 accidents in the last ten years.

For what it's worth, Omni has worse numbers in terms of departures per accident. They have a rolling average of about 54k departures/accident.

ATSG is probably making some pretty smart moves by moving safety personnel from ABX to areas that are experiencing rapid growth right now. That's the type of move that positions them for long-term sustainable growth. They're preempting problems which they can anticipate as street-captains get hired at Omni and the upgrade at ATI keeps getting shorter.

So, I mean, good work! There's a lot going wrong at all of our carriers, but this actually looks smart.

The blazing, red, neon-light problem at Atlas is the combination of relatively low departures per accident and a relatively high operational tempo. Omni has problems, but they fly very few departures. So their statistical mean tim to next accident is about 113 months (just under ten years). Atlas flies a lot more. Our mean time to our next accident is sitting around 19 months, assuming no growth in departures.

I checked these numbers against what is actually happening by comparing these methods to what very busy carriers fly. They're reasonably accurate with increasing accuracy as mean time to next accident decreases.

What I couldn't do was apply better modeling since I was comparing carriers that fly a lot with many data points to carriers that fly very few departures. So censoring the data was tough, and I couldn't appropriately apply any decent modeling to the numbers. Simple averages and trends are all that I trust from the publicly available data.

6Badger9

UPS flight 1354

UPS flight 2

FedEx flight 80

Just a few I know off the top of my head.

Elevation

There's also a story of improvement at ABX that hasn't made it to other carriers. That's kind of a shame. There were some pretty ugly details of an accident deep in ABX's history that I believe (I can't confirm) resulted in some major improvements to ABX's safety performance.

For example, statistically, ABX was a safer airline than FedEx (in terms of departures per accident) until 2013. ABX was averaging 466k departures without an accident. Today's national average is about 330k departures/accident.

ABX contracted. Contracts stalled. People's lives and careers floundered. All the drama we know about happened and ABX kept flying without an accident. By these metrics ABX was still beating Delta's average departures per accident in 2018.

So, again, way to go! We could and should learn from you guys (ATSG generally and ABX specifically in terms of safety performance). As an ATI pilot, I'd use a fair bit of caution. ABX has a lot to offer in terms of knowledge. It behooves you to listen to those guys.

NeverHome

Ah yes I stand corrected!