Collision Course: The Truth About Airline Safety.

• Author: Poole, Robert W., Jr.

AIRLINE CRASHES ARE HORRIFYING events. As a frequent flyer, I am personally concerned about air safety, to the point of reading the detailed crash post-mortem reports by the National Transportation Safety Board and occasionally avoiding an airline on safety grounds. In addition, as a longtime transportation researcher, I have followed with keen interest the airline industry's evolution from cartel to open competition.

So I was especially curious to see what Ralph Nader's new book would have to say on airline safety. After all, a Nader group, the Aviation Consumer Action Project, had been one of the key members of the coalition promoting Ted Kennedy's airline deregulation efforts in the mid-1970s. And a Nader's Raiders group several years before had ripped apart the cartelization imposed on railroads and trucking by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

But then again, this is the 1990s, not the '70s. Thus, the thesis of this new book by Nader and fellow attorney Wesley J. Smith is that airline deregulation has made airlines less safe. Their argument runs as follows: Cutthroat competition has forced airlines to keep old planes in service, to use inexperienced pilots, and to cut corners on maintenance. The nominal safety regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, is in thrall to the airlines (and is incompetent anyway). Hence, consumers are not being protected from the corporate airline buccaneers.

Unfortunately for their thesis, Nader and Smith immediately run up against some inconvenient facts. Every objective assessment of the statistics on airline accidents before and after deregulation shows significant reductions in accident and death rates in the years since deregulation became the law of the land. Nader and Smith even cite the leading academic work on the subject, Why Airplanes Crash, by Clinton Oster, John Strong, and Kurt Zorn (Oxford University Press, 1992), only to dismiss it as merely "statistical history."

Nader and Smith prefer to rely on anecdotes of horrible crashes, whistle-blower accounts, and a few out-of-context statistics--e.g., counting raw numbers rather than rates of crashes, or reporting a one-year statistical upward blip while ignoring the underlying downward trend. Airline crashes are statistically rare events, and the only way to make sense of the data is to look at rates and trends.

In case the reader is still unconvinced, the authors' final argument is that even though the accident figures may still look...