Analyzing aviation safety: Problems, challenges, opportunities 

ABSTRACT: This paper reviews the economic literature relating to aviation safety; analyzes the safety record of commercial passenger aviation in the United States and abroad; examines aviation security as a growing dimension of aviation safety; and identifies emerging issues in airline safety and challenges for aviation safety research. Commercial airline safety has improved dramatically since the industry’s birth over a century ago. Fatal accident rates for large scheduled jet airlines have fallen to the level where (along many dimensions) aviation is now the safest mode of commercial transportation. However, safety performance has not been evenly distributed across all segments of commercial aviation, nor among all countries and regions of the world. The finding that developing countries have much poorer safety records has been a persistent conclusion in aviation safety research and continues to be the case. Unfortunately, operations data are not available for many of the airlines that experience fatal accidents, so it is not possible to calculate reliable fatality rates for many segments of the worldwide aviation industry. Without more complete information, it will likely be difficult to make substantial improvements in the safety of these operations. Challenges to improving aviation security include: how much to focus on identifying the terrorists as opposed to identifying the tools they might use; determining how to respond to terrorist threats; and determining the public versus private roles in providing aviation security. The next generation of safety challenges now require development and understanding of new forms of data to improve safety in other segments of commercial aviation, and moving from a reactive, incident-based approach toward a more proactive, predictive and systems-based approach.

Keywords: Aviation safety; Aviation security; Aviation terrorism

分析航空安全： 问题、挑战和机遇

摘要：本文回顾了与航空安全相关的经济文献；分析了美国和其他国家的商业客机航空安全记录；研究了作为航空安全日益增长维度的航空安全；并指出了航空公司安全和航空安全研究所面临的新问题。自航空工业诞生以来，商业航空安全水平有了显著提高。大型定期喷气式航空公司（在许多方面）的致命事故率显著降低，使得航空业成为商业交通最安全方式之一。然而，安全表现在商业航空的所有细分领域以及全球各国和地区之间并不均匀。发展中国家的安全记录较差一直是航空安全研究的持久结论，并且这种情况仍然存在。不幸的是，许多经历致命事故的航空公司的运营数据并不可用，因此不可能为全球航空业的许多细分领域计算可靠的死亡率。缺乏更完整的信息，要在这些运营的安全性方面取得实质性的改进可能会很困难。改进航空安全面临的挑战包括：重点放在识别恐怖分子本人还是识别他们可能使用的工具上；确定如何应对恐怖分子威胁；以及确定公共与私人在提供航空安全方面的角色。下一代安全挑战现在需要开发和理解新形式的数据，以改进商业航空的其他细分领域的安全性，并从一种反应性、基于事故的方法转向更为主动、预测性和系统化的方法。

关键词：航空安全；航空安保；航空恐怖主义

来源：Oster Jr, C. V., Strong, J. S., & Zorn, C. K. (2013). Analyzing aviation safety: Problems, challenges, opportunities. Research in transportation economics, 43(1), 148-164.