Tag: airline safety

OM in the News: Have a Fear of Flying? Don’t Read Today’s Post

Airlines’ hiring binge has suddenly thrust many pilots behind the controls of different, bigger planes than they are used to flying, reports The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 8, 2023). That rapid advancement is fueling anxieties over whether pilots’ newness to certain aircraft could lead to serious incidents and accidents.

The union for Southwest’s pilots believes the airline’s initial training program needs a bigger revamp. Major carriers have added nearly 10,000 pilots to their ranks this year.

Pilot newness to airplanes’ make and model is among the factors officials have looked at since air travel’s fast, and often strained bounce back from the pandemic. This aspect of “juniority” has emerged in the aftermath of some serious problems over the last two years, leading pilots, airline officials and safety experts to scrutinize the experience level of the people in the cockpit.

With travel demand soaring, pilots are moving up through the ranks faster than before. Major carriers are pulling pilots from regional carriers more quickly, with pilots used to smaller airliners advancing to bigger planes, needing to learn new procedures, controls and quirks. Airlines that hurried pilots out the door during the height of the pandemic had to quickly pivot when demand surged back. Carriers have added 23,000 pilots to their ranks the past two years, dramatically higher than decade long averages.

There is precedent for concern. The U.S. Transportation Department found a correlation between accidents and pilot experience with aircraft type. Analyzing 322 airline accidents, the office found fewer accidents involving pilots who had more time flying the aircraft make and model.

The industrywide battle for pilots has jolted the methodical pilot career progress. Regional carriers are struggling to hold on to pilots for more than a few years.  About 8,000 regional pilots are expected to move on to bigger airlines this year—44% of that workforce. Before the pandemic, regional pilot turnover was 10% to 20%.

“The pace of hiring and the resulting turnover is unprecedented. I do have a concern over the experience in seat,” said the CEO of one carrier. Some pilots are able to move from smaller planes to bigger ones or to upgrade from first officer to captain years faster than the decade-long waits they sometimes faced in the past. The chairman of the United pilots’ union said the airline’s internal monitoring systems have turned up issues that appear to be correlated with the amount of time pilots have spent in their seats.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What tools in Chapter 6 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text could be used to analyze this potential problem?
  2. What would quality guru Philip Crosby say about the issue? (see page 217)

OM in the News: The Probability of a Disaster

probabilityLet’s say Bob is jetting from Heathrow to JFK on a Virgin Airways A330. Chance of crashing? One in 5.4 million. That means that he could apparently expect to fly on the route for 14,716 years before plummeting into the Atlantic, writes The Economist (Jan.29, 2015). The 14,716 years figure might cause your students a bit of confusion.  It’s the average length of time people will fly before crashing, if lots and lots of them do it every day. An alternative way of expressing it would be to say that if you were to arrange to fly this route every day for the next 10,210 years, your chance of dying would be 50%. And if you wanted to book enough flights to be almost certain of crashing, you reach a 99% probability at 67,833 years of daily flights.

Safety statistics collated by IATA, the airline association, show that in 2013 more than 3 billion people flew on commercial aircraft. During that time, there were 81 accidents and 210 fatalities. What is more, this figure has been falling for years.  By way of comparison, the World Health Organisation says there were over 1.2 million road traffic deaths around the world in 2010. It is the leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds. Oxford University calculates that in 2006, a British resident had odds of 1 in 36,512 of dying in a motor accident and 1 in 3.5 million dying in a plane crash.

The deadliest plane crash in history occurred in 1977 in Tenerife when 583 people were killed after two jumbos collided on the runway. Yet, that many people die from heart disease in the U.S. every 8 hours. As the book How Risky Is it, Really explains, air crashes are considered catastrophes while heart attacks are not, because they fulfill 3 criteria: “A catastrophe has to be big, it has to happen all at once, and something about it has to be calamitous—disastrous—really bad. A plane crash kills a lot of people all at once, in one place, and in a really horrific way. But heart disease meets only one of those criteria.”

Classroom discussion questions:

1. How does this concept impact supply chain disruptions that we discuss in Supplement 11?

2. Why are probabilities such as these important in operations management?

 

Teaching Tip: Building an SPC Chart with Airline Safety Data

A very interesting article just came out in US News and World Report (Jan.25,2011) that deals with airline safety “incidence reports”. I thought the data might make a good in class example of how to build and interpret a p-chart when you teach SPC in Supp.6. Here is the scenario US News reports:

 All the major US airlines are very, very safe, to begin. Rarely do they end with a fatal crash (the last one was Feb.12, 2009 when Continental Connection #3407 killed 50 people when it crashed in Buffalo). But safety incidents do occur. (Recall the plane that landed in the Hudson River not long ago).  Using FAA and other sources, documented incidents (such as mechanical issues) for the 8 largest carriers follow.

Jet Blue: 17 incidents per 219,000 flights in 2010. This averages to a p- value of .0000776

American Airlines: 87 per 1,241,000 or p=.0000701

United Airlines: 49 per 1,204,500 or p=.0000407

Delta Airlines: 77 per 1,994,725 or p=.0000386

Continental Airlines: 23 per 884,395 or p=.0000260

US Air: 24 per 1,131,865 or p= .0000212

Southwest Air: 23 per 1,131,500 or p=.0000203

Air Tran: 5 per 255,500 or p=.0000196

Take these 8 observations and have the class create a p-chart using these timely, real-world data.  Are any of the major airlines “out-of-control”? ( I computed that the overall p-bar =.000038 (at 95% confidence). The UCL=.000042, and the LCL=.000033. Only two airlines are “in control”, but 4 are better than the LCL. I did this by computing the total sample size to be 8,062,985 with no. incidences =305).

 Thanks to Prof. Kevin Watson at Iowa State for today’s link and idea.