How Safe is Safety? Part 4-Lessons Learned

We all learn from our mistakes, especially when we suffer from aviation accidents of various degrees in severity. We learn from incidents too. While this second to last concluding post is brief, this further proves despite incidents and no matter how many accidents have occured in the past, jet aircraft are safe. As will be discussed later, some of the blame for various contributing factors and probable causes in each accident can be non-related to human error. These 'other' factors (under broad ranges) include weather and terrorism. The other two points blame to the humans responsible: the industry and human error-or on a broader scope, human factors.

However, you can't point the blame for any single type of factor. Accidents always involve a mix of factors-some of which often can't be confirmed. If you go to a site like airline-safety.net, you'll find many accident reports that are incredibly extensive-and a large portion of the findings aren't confirmed. A few accident scenarios never happen again after one bad accident, while others do in with varying contributing factors; only until later do we act on certain issues that are revealed because of those accidents.

Some of the many accidents that I learned about in my aviation safety class proves all this. For example, take the United Airlines Flight 585 accident and the Us Air flight 427. Both were 737 accidents and the first occurred in 1991, the second occurred in 1994. Granted thats a long time ago, but one of the major causes of the accident was not weather related, but a fault by the Boeing industry-there was some kind of failure in the rudder design that made the plane loose control. I'm not going to describe into the accident because I'm lazy, but if you're curious, look both of these accidents up-the NTSB had lots of trouble with learning about what really went wrong with the first accident in 1991 until the SECOND one happened. Then after that Boeing revamped the 737's rudder system, and the aircraft became more reliable. Things like this happen over and over again in the aviation world-we just have to continue to be as careful as possible.