ICAO Symposium from May 25th to 27th, 2005 at Shanghail, China
Seockjin Hong, Professor, University of Incheon
Thank you very much Mr. Moderator. Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, I would like to wish you one and all a very good afternoon. I would like to thank the ICAO, IATA and CAAC for giving me the opportunity to be here today. I’m sure that I speak for all of us when I say that is an honor and a privilege to be here. I wish in addition to express my gratitude to the organizers of this symposium for the generous hospitality it has extended to us, as well as for the fantastic river cruise which we had the pleasure of taking yesterday evening.
As a member of the panel for session three of this symposium, which deals with the topic of ensuring the safety, security, and responsive infrastructure needed for liberalization, I would like to say a few words about aviation safety issues; in particular about safety and the media, safety and cultures, safety and liberalization as well as on LCCs, before finally concluding with a few remarks about safety and regional cooperation from a technical standpoint.
1. First of all, I would like to discuss the issue of safety and the media.
Aviation disasters and near misses have been almost commonplace over the last year. Does this seemingly sudden rash of mishaps mean that flying has become more dangerous? That answer is open to interpretation depending on which statistics we use: the ICAO’s, IATA’s or the U.S. NTSB.
While there has been a slight increase in commercial airplane accidents and related deaths over the past few years, there is no proof that flying has gotten any more dangerous. But yet, people are more afraid of flying than of driving a car or being in water.
According to Professor Barnett of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this phenomenon is partially due to the fact that rare or dramatic deaths receive more media attention than mundane or commonplace ones. In his study, he counted the number of articles dealing with deaths and categorized them by cause of death, including cancer, homicide, AIDS, and airplane accidents.
For each category, he took the number of front-page articles in the New York Times and divided it by the overall number of people who expired from that particular cause of death. He found 0.02 front-page articles about cancer per 1,000 cancer deaths and approximately 138.2 front-page articles about airplane accidents per 1,000 airplane-related deaths. In other words, deaths from airplane crashes received 8,100 times more media coverage than deaths from cancer.
As such, could this media bias or such excessive media attention influence the growth of air transportation, low-cost carriers’ growth, or even the development of Northeast Asia’s air transport industry? In my opinion, yes it will.
Mr. Harbison this morning mentioned that there is no evidence that LCCs are any less safe. Nevertheless, the media has already begun to focus on the safety of these carriers. This media bias could in turn entail the creation of a similar bias amongst consumers.
2. Safety and Culture
No matter how well equipment is designed, how sensible regulations are, or how well people excel in the performance of their individual or team duties, all of these factors are subordinate to the system that binds them. As such, it is time to start thinking about aviation safety in collective rather than individual terms.
Using this approach, we can then expand the scope of the analysis of accidents from individuals to the organizational culture. As Donoghue has argued (1998), all airlines have their own particular circumstances; i.e. the age of the fleet, the state of their equipment and the efficiency of their corporate structures.
As such, given these differing circumstances, the introduction of a safety initiative will naturally affect each carrier differently, and become an issue to be promoted or fought over as each seeks the path that best suits them individually.
The simple argument that a certain cultural or organizational factor can be identified as one of the causes of an accident is a hard one to prove. However, Helmreich and Merritt (1988) have argued that Confucian culture can indeed be identified as a factor in the accidents involving Northeast Asian carriers. However, I would like to propose that the cause of accidents is not Confucian culture itself. Whenever a culture meets another some shock or conflict can be expected.
While no one can state that a particular culture is better than any other, an argument can be made within the aviation industry that as aircrafts are developed in the West based on Western concepts, westerners may be able to adapt more easily to operating these aircrafts. What’s more, the Confucian culture prevalent in Northeast Asia is inherently more hierarchical than western cultures. As such, there is a real probability that this Confucian culture is indeed more likely to induce airplane accidents. Thus, in this period of ever-expanding growth and of the advent of a liberalized environment, there is a need to recall that safety should always be the primary concern across all cultures.
3. Safety, Liberalization, and LCCs
It is a well-known fact that the increase in air traffic is closely related to economic growth. Moreover, the future expansion of air traffic will continue to depend primarily on the growth of the world economy. In this regards, can accidents also somehow be linked with economic downturns or growth? According to the General Accounting Office (GAO,1998), there are four factors that affect the safe operation of airlines; financial stability, maintenance quality, management attitude, and pilot competence.
When airlines suffer economic setbacks, they are often forced to cut back on investment; which in turn leads to less money for training programs, fewer funds available for maintenance costs, and increased layoffs. The debate over the effect of deregulation on air safety is an ongoing one. However, some scholars, such as Kanafani and Keeler (1989), have concluded that deregulation has had no effect on the airline industry. As such, as long as the elasticity between traffic volume and gross national product remains proportionate, close attention should be paid to the effect of the rapid growth of low-cost carriers on safety.
Many experts have pointed out that one of the main causes of the accident in Miami involving a Valujet plane in 1996 may in fact have been the company’s high growth rate. In other words, airlines’ safety culture has not kept pace with their rapid economic growth. The advent of a liberalized environment within the air transport industry will result in increasing the supply and demand for low-cost carriers, and this even in those countries where regulatory mechanisms are still in place. The GAO recently published a report in which it stated that newcomers with less than five years experience in the market were more likely to be involved in incidents than more established carriers. Yesterday, we heard Prof. Tae Oum and other distinguished speakers mention that more liberalization will intrinsically lead to more traffic and more LCCs.
As such, the advent of a more liberalized environment and the subsequent increase in traffic could potentially result in more accidents. Thus, the government’s role in assuring aviation safety will become even greater than before; and this even if the airline industry effectuates a shift towards becoming a market-driven industry. Changes in the regulatory regime should not mean the adoption of a laissez-faire attitude towards safety, especially where new entrants are concerned.
4. Regional Cooperation from a Technical Standpoint
Air transport is a very safe mode of travel, and it is getting safer all the time. The main contributor to the improvement in flight safety has most likely been new technology. Systematic and coordinated activities are an essential element when it comes to achieving effective and consistent airline safety performance. In this regards, safety planning is the cornerstone of effective safety management. Such planning should focus on the sharing, both at the regional and international level, of safety management tips and experiences, the coordination of related activities, and the provision of the necessary resources.
The time has come for the countries of Northeast Asia to begin placing more emphasis on cooperation in the field of air safety than on economic aspects. We heard Mr. Yamaguchi say yesterday that, “The time has come to move from a non-cooperative to a cooperative timetable.” It is my belief that this cooperation should begin in non-economic spheres. Furthermore, in-depth and consistent interaction will be needed to accelerate the development of common ground.
It is my contention that LCCs are changing the aviation industry around the world, and this even in countries were few or no such carriers can be found. To wrap up my comments on aviation safety, the achievement of a balance between safety and economic activities will help to assure sustainability, especially amidst the current circumstances marked by the emergence of LCCs exhibiting high growth rates.
I’ll leave you today with one thought: if governments and airlines do not accept and carry out their respective roles during this shift from a regulatory to liberalized environment, things could get even more interesting!!!
Thank you very much for your time today.
