Information Is Beautiful

Yeah thanks mate. Now I panic if I can’t get a seat in the rear third of the plane.

…how can someone die from blogging?

You say that the higher ratio implies a safer plane but the 777 with zero fatal accidents has the lowest possible ratio of zero. According to your heading, this is the most fatal plane.

It also seems there should be some accounting for flight miles and/or number of flights. My preference would be for flights (take-off/landing) instead of miles since it correlates with the risk of a flight and does not make larger planes flown mostly on long flights appear safer by virtue of flying more miles but fewer trips.

Just echoing what Garrett said. Much of this data needs to be normalized by number of miles flown or number of flights made. For example, are there more crashes in the summer because there is a lot of bad weather or simply because more flights are made?

What’s going on with the data in the first slide?

None of the data in your google docs spreadsheet agrees with your cited source. Your numbers are closer to the number of accidents, not fatal accidents. The title of the slide is “Density of Fatal Accidents 1942-2009″ so I assume you are stating that, for example, the US had 2613 fatal accidents but your source only lists 1079.

So did you pick the wrong data or title your slide incorrectly?

Interesting graphs and statistics.
I echo the suggestions of correlating to the number of takeoffs/landings.
Also, the ratio of accidents per number of aircraft in service could be misleading.

For example, the DC9 series may have had more aircraft in service in the past than it does now. So the number of aircraft in service should somehow be normalized to take into account how many were in service at the time.

To clarify, and end of life aircraft may have few still in service currently, but still has all the accidents over its product lifecycle.

Great work, though!
Best regards!

Hi there

Great set of images. Couple of comments.

Your Final Destination Density Chart is pretty meaningless without knowing what percentage of flights went to that country. What if 0.1% of flights to the US crashed whereas 80% of flights to Papua New Guinea crashed? That cannot be deduced from your chart.

Same with the plane type. Your chart suggests that the 737 is the least safe type, whereas it may actually be the safest (e.g., say 3 million flights with 60 crashes is much safer than 10 flights with 7 crashes).

Think about what you want to convey!

Just one minor additional comment: I don’t think it’s supposed to be “Pre-fight check” at the top!

“Ratio of fatal accidents to number of planes in service (the higher the better)”
Am I crazy or is this the other way around?

If you meant, “the higher the better [chance of being in an accident],” perhaps this needs to be restated. As it stands, it resembles the sort of thing Tufte rants about in his criticism of the NASA slide using the word “significant” in contradictory ways.

I don’t see any comparison based upon type of plane versus number of air miles flown.

A plane model with fewer air miles for the entire fleet of that make should have a lower rate than a plane model with more air miles for the fleet. Planes on the ground don’t usually have accidents.

There should also be some comparison with number in fleet versus air miles of fleet, to get an idea of a model is being worked more than others.

This link seems to argue against the Embraer stat. of 0 crashes (or did I misread your graph?)

http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/embraer.htm

“Ratio of Fatal Accidents to number of planes in service”

In service NOW? Or in service EVER? It looks like you have used the former but it should be the latter, if anything.

Either way, since the number of planes in service changes in time, the statistic is pretty meaningless. Accidents are distributed over time. The risk of EACH single accident on a particular date with X planes of that type in service on that day is meaningful, but you cannot combine statistics for ALL accidents occurring with that plane model.

You would have to “sum”, for each and every day, the ratio of accidents that day based on the number of planes in service that day. Again, meaningless.

I like the visualization of the data. Airline safety statistics can make the eyes glaze over if you’re not careful, so anything that summarizes data in an easy to understand fashion is a good thing. I’m a bit partial to the way I display data at AirSafe.com, but there is always room online for different ways to deal with describing airline risks.

Thanks muchly for your work on the aviation deaths, but wouldn’t the country of origin be more relevant to the likelihood of a crash than the destination country?

Eg. I live in Australia, and all the aircraft used and owned by our national carrier Quantas and local carriers Jetstar and Virgin etc are all serviced and maintained locally in Australia.

I feel (without justification to offer!) that local service and ownership would be a significant contributor to better safety. Local Australian ownership means the age of the aircraft is lower and local repairs mean a better likelihood of quality spare parts and quality work, as opposed a greater risk of questionable second hand parts from (say) Russia.

If I’m right, then to rate Australia as a destination as you have done, you would need to work out where the aircraft that crashed here came from and who serviced them…

Cheers,

Salo

Many things have changed in the last fifty years of aviation. We transitioned from props to jets. We have ILS to provide precision guidance to the runway. We have automatic landing which takes pilot error out of landing in bad weather. We have the Ground Proximity Warning System to warn when headed toward a crash. We have TCAS to prevent mid-air collisions.

When you go back too many years, you mush together aviation as it is today with how it was years ago. Few, if any, who see this site will be interested in history. Rather, they want to know about CURRENT safety. When the focus of these statistics goes back before 1990, that is far too removed from the level of safety we have today. So your presentations fail to reflect what people want to know that can help them make a decision when flying.

Are you aware that driving a car for more than 20 km is already more dangerous than a direct flight? If you have arrived at the airport by car you have already survived the most dangerous part of the journey. So why even think about plane crashes? ;-)

Aeroflot never used DC-9. Perhaps you meant DC-10 (Aeroflot Cargo).
The Clipart for DC-9 is a Fokker F-70.
See Wikipedia for further information.

You need to include relative proportions rather than absolute proportions in your plane crash data (i.e. plane crashes per # of flights). Or better yet, include both.

Since the point of the graphics is to discuss fatalities, shouldn’t the focus be on the number of fatalities rather than the number of fatal accidents?

I’ve actually flown from the US to Russia through Aeroflot in August (not sure the type of plane, though). Won’t be showing this chart to my grandmother any time soon.

I don’t really think this chart is doing the public a service. They are likely to take it seriously. The ratio of fear to actual danger is probably higher for air-flight than anything else.

I really love the work you do but this is both useless and paranoia-inducing.

Bad data is bad data.

What is the usefulness of a total plane crash number by country/plane? 0. You need the per flight number. . .i.e. is the 737 a deadly plane or the most popular plane ever?

Beautiful work, David
I’m so happy to have found your website; the Miscellaneum is now on my Yule wish list.

It would be interesting to see how the data looks when normalized.
for instance the 737 is one of the most common aircraft types, at over 7000 craft; there were only 20 Concordes ever built.
cheers.
/PhM
(a big Tufte fan)