On April 24, the e-mail edition of Callback arrived in my in box. It proudly announced that the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System had processed its one millionth safety incident report on March 21, 2012. Three days later I received the NTSB release addressing 2011’s preliminary stats, No Fatalities On U.S. Airlines or Commuters, General Aviation Accidents Increased.
Safety is the only direct relationship between the coincidental announcements.
After reading the 2011 stats, there appeared to be no significant reason for alarms. The increases were small, just 50 more accidents for all of civil aviation, with total fatalities up just 12, and on-demand Part 135 ops and GA were responsible for the the bulk of them. Given the small numbers, they are the margin of error that nothing will eliminate.
Digging into the ASRS numbers, and who made the reports, proved far more interesting. NASA started counting them in April 1976, and reached 1 million a month short of 36 years later. Using simple math, that’s 27,778 a year, 2,315 a month, 579 a week, or 83 a day. This ASRS chart above shows how quickly pilots got on board with the program. But that’s not the surprise. It’s who made the reports, and the demographic changes in their numbers over three decades of pilot population shrinkage.
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