Business is booming for air safety investigators around the world. Following a period of relative calm in 2017, the safest year on record for passenger airlines, there has now been a steady uptick in both accidents and fatalities. In fact, according to statistics collected by the Air Safety Network, the number of accidents since the end of 2017 is now above the five-year average. Two Boeing 737-8 Max accidents since October 2018 have not helped; collectively, these events have accounted for the loss of 346 lives.
So, why do airplanes crash? There are some usual suspects such as “gravity beats lift” or “drag defeats thrust,” but to really determine cause, investigators subscribe to an accident-causation model. Personally, I like James Reason’s Swiss cheese model of accident causation since it is a useful tool to explain very complex events.
However, the first step is to view each event with a wide lens and understand, as aviation safety researcher Sydney Dekker suggests, that “accidents are not accidents at all, but a failure in risk management.” To become even more open-minded, think of them as a “failure in imagination”—that’s how the 9/11 Commission report described the deep institutional failures associated with the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Reason’s Swiss cheese model gained popularity because “it illustrates that although many layers of defense lie between hazards and accidents, there are flaws in each layer that, if aligned, can allow the accident to occur.” By taking this approach, Reason’s model explores both active and latent failures and the four failure
Article source: https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/blogs/ainsight-airplanes-crash-reason
