CommutAir vs ExpressJet vs Republic Safety
 

Which of the regional airlines has best flight safety records and best trained pilot and FOs? Thanks.

These days a lot of secondary market flights are DBAs operated by regional for AA/United/Delta.

Thanks a lot.

no regional airline has had a passenger fatality caused by an accident in over a decade. how are you defining safest?

One of them did crash last month.

The absence of accidents is not necessarily an indication of safety.

Exhibit A https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...7b7c5cb008.jpg

Thanks guys for the replies. I would like to hear comments from Pilots and FOs who are currently working for the regional. They would know this best to some extent? Thanks.

Commutair crashed last month, so there is that. Also FYI FO’s are pilots to. They fly half the flights.

I guess you are talking about this one?

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-sta...unway-in-maine

“Safety” can mean a lot of things. Can you be more specific? Accidents are not necessarily indicative of an airlines safety culture.

Is that Jerry?

Yeah. The news spun it well early as a runway excursion, but they never touched pavement.

The questions you ask are pretty subjective.
Better questions-
1. Is the training in house or third party?
2. If internal what’s the instructor average seniority?
3. Do they use AQP? If so, how long have they done so?

Thanks. Above are better questions.

I also like to hear safety culture for the regional. My understanding regional is subject to same FAA rules and regulations regarding safety.

Safety culture is a much better metric.

I would say that zero fatal accidents over a decade is proof of safety. It’s unclear to me how that could be improved from a passenger standpoint

So you’re an outcome based pilot? As long as we get from point A to B without bending metal/killing someone it was safe....😳

There is a lot to safety more then accident rates.

We operate under the same regulations as majors. Every. Single. One. We do the exact same job as them, just as well as them, only we get paid less then half as much.

Why these regionals in particular? You left our more than half of the regional population.

It’s sort of immeasurable anyway.

Methinks someone is flying on United to/from/through EWR or IAD sometime soon.

As a fellow nervous traveler, I try to find information on this topic too. I'm usually laughed at by pilots or at least reassured that flying is extremely safe. And like, yeah, I know that there's only been one fatality in commercial aviation in the US in the last 10 years. Nor have the E145 or E175 seen any fatal accidents. But as others have said, safety is more nuanced than the total number of fatalities. My main concern is poor maintenance, as mechanics seem to be criminally underpaid ($16 per hour?!) at most regionals, especially considering the complexity and importance of the job.



Consider the following Indeed.com review from a former Envoy mechanic:



Or perhaps this quote from a former Republic mechanic:



And of course, Envoy and Republic are *good* companies. I hate to imagine the standards at some of the more questionable regionals.



Honest question - what should passengers make of comments like this? Disgruntled employee? Problem with safety culture at Envoy? Bad management at this particular hangar? What happens when maintenance is lacking because management wants to save a few bucks? Does the FAA actually have the capacity to crack down on all this stuff, or do they only have time to go after the worst offenders?

I picked these 3 regionals as they are often seen code shares out of hubs in NYC. Thanka.

To me, paying FO on avergae of 45k a year is not an acceptable practice. FO is SIC and in charge of lives of up to 75 peoples on board together with PIC. Our kids school teacher earn more than that (teachers shall get paid more too).

Given Boeing can cut corners like in 738 Max case, shouldnt we keep pay scale better in this reality?

Of course, all of these are from passenger perspective.

This is definitional, but yes. Not killing any passengers for a decade means that the system is safe. The outcome is what matters.

Process is important. Process delivers outcomes. But the outcome stands by itself. No form of transportation is safer than US 121.

Asckshually, high speed rail in Japan (bullet train / Shinkansen) has had 0 passenger fatalities since it was first implemented in the 60's.

Yes and Qantas never crashed. I forgot about that. Neither one goes from Cincinnati to LA.

0yeah, pretty safe

That's a good trend, but not a guarantee of safety.

The Concorde was the safest airline type then world had ever seen. In a few seconds it went from the safest type in history to the most dangerous. Turns out it had systemic problems all along, just took time for odds to catch up to them.

Processes and systems are what guarantee safety over the long term, not yesterday's performance. I've lived through a few regional cycles, and we entering another cycle of rapid attrition, hiring, and upgrade at the regionals... there is no way that will not be a factor. The only mitigation is that there's probably not going to be a lot of regional growth (mature scope).

Expressjet has the best training by far. I would not hesitate putting any family member or friend on an Expressjet a/c.

And what qualifies you to make such a bold statement?

I can not agree more.

If statistics is of any help (1 crash over 10 years in US), knock the wood and hope it will never happen, but statistics says it will happen for sure (probably sooner as it has not for 10 years)

Concorde total fleet hours was on the order of 250,000. Too small a denominator to be relevant. (https://www.heritageconcorde.com/airframe-detail)


Roughly 40 million regional hours the last 10 years, 0 fatalities.

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.raa.org/re...Statistics.png


The average person dies every 700,000 hours. What more do you want?

You can drive home buzzed while not wearing your seatbelt and make it home without getting into an accident. But was that safe? This is precisely why safety is not outcome based. Just because you made it home doesn’t mean the journey was safe.

I’m surprised not all airlines have dispelled this myth in their safety courses. Who do you work for?

If you were wearing a green shirt and crashed while driving home, does that mean wearing green is hazardous to driving?

A sample size of one means nothing. You're right, safety is not outcome based... It's based on many, many, many outcomes.

US is a major market for 737 Max, and we apparently have no issues so far before grounding (500,000 flights on 737 max so far?). The outcome in US is good, however, plane has issues as everyone knows now.

Safety can be measured by outcome in one way or the other, but it is beyond outcome.

CommutAir vs ExpressJet vs Republic Safety
 

You are proving my point. This isn’t about sample size. I was giving just one hypothetical to illustrate how safety is not outcome based. Just because you made it home, doesn’t necessarily mean you were safe, regardless of what you were wearing.

Safety is about mitigating or managing risks. It’s about recognizing threats and errors, using CRM, standard/best practices, judgement, experience, skill, etc to trap them before you have an undesired aircraft state.

That argument works to a certain order of magnitude. Yes, just because you did it 1 time or 100 times and got away with it doesn't make it safe.

Do it 40 million times and get away with it? That's safe.

CommutAir vs ExpressJet vs Republic Safety
 

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?

I'm getting confused now

Wow times have changed. Not much more than a decade ago 45k for an FO would have been virtually unheard of. I never made more than 32k as an RJ FO, and as a BE-1900 captain for CommutAir, I topped out at 30k. In 2005 my drug addicted, convicted felon, high school dropout former brother-in-law made more money delivering pizza for Dominos than I did as a CommutAir captain.

Statistics is backward looking all the time. It is one way (probably one of most important ways) to look at safety.

However saying “safety = some statistics” is kind of like saying “good students = good test result from standardized tests”.

1 in 40 million is a very sound measure and give folks a lot of confidence. People feel safe. If someone sells you a lottery with winning chance of 1 in 40 million, you must feel it is better than powerball, you may feel lucky, do you?

So safety is a process/culture folks can continue to improve, it is forward looking if you can think that way, making the crash rate like powerball type of chance if we can.