Aviation Products Liability—A Technical Viewpoint

Extract

The modern jet transport has established an excellent safety record of which the industry can justly be proud, but with the airlines soon to be flying something of the order of a million hours per month, the potential exposure to accident in the years ahead is considerable.

The first 50M hours of jet flight took 12 years to achieve and—excluding the wanton destruction of aircraft in the Middle East—involved the loss of 132 aircraft and the deaths of 3800 passengers, or an average of aircraft and 76 passengers per million hours. Isolation of the past three years of this record to detect the later trend reveals an improvement to an average of 2 aircraft and 51 passengers per million hours. Given no further improvement this would soon become the average monthly rate of loss, but because of the uncertainty as to the passenger load factor in any particular accident, consideration must now be given to the realistic possibility of losing at least 20 aircraft and perhaps 1000 or more passengers in any one year. Given the validity of this concept, then over the next five years whatever dollar figure is chosen to represent the financial problem involved, the first digit is likely to be followed by nine noughts!