'Hey, Lou, this propeller looks pretty sturdy to me.' (commuter airline safety)

• Author: Sussman, Ed

Except for the slipshod inspections, the loose regulations, and the untrained pilots, commuter airlines are pretty safe

Not long ago on This Week with David Brinkley" the conversation turned to the latest wellpublicized airline disaster, the crash of Delta night 1141 en route from Dallas-Ft. Worth to Salt Lake City. After it was duly noted that things could have turned out much worse (94 of 107 people on board survived the crash), Sam Donaldson, ABC's star correspondent, launched into some mild criticism of aviation safety, for which he was promptly and predictably attacked by George Will, ABC's star conservative.

Will ticked off the standard defense of the airline industry, arguing it is still more dangerous to drive to the airport or cross the street than to fly, and he was supported by Hodding Carter, the liberal ABC commentator, who held that those in the news business like to focus attention on airline safety because they jet around so often and fear for their own lives. Outnumbered, Donaldson backed off a bit, but not before noting how there was nothing quite like an air disaster to get people crowding around television sets.

Poor Sam. There he was falling back on hype when he had the chance to put forward the facts and at the same time get Will with the kind of zinger that gives people reason to wake up on Sunday mornings. Instead of citing the shock value of an aviation disaster, Donaldson might have asked Will when he was last forced to fly in a ten-seat, twin-engine turbo-prop from, say, Raleigh to Richmond, or in a Beechcraft 1900 from Homer, Alaska to Kodiak. Not lately, George? Well, then it's no surprise you think air travel is so much safer than car travel. For the places you've probably been jetting off to, you've got it right (although the 31 accidents involving scheduled major airlines in 1987 was the highest number since 1974). Try spending a few hours aboard a small commuter airline and then tell us about airline safety.

The residents of small and some not-so-small towns routinely do just that (minus the television pulpit). For them, air travel means the piston- or turbine-engine airplane, not the airline jet, from which the usual it's-safer-than-driving statistics are culled. This has been the case especially since deregulation in 1978, when the major airlines were allowed to leave the less profitable routes to the minors, known as commuters, or as those in the industry prefer, "regional airlines '" And, though it may surprise Will, the latest information from the research director of the congressionally created Aviation Safety Commission indicates that for those who fly with the bottom two-thirds (by size) of the commuter airlines, it's too close to say whether driving a car is riskier than flying. For every one million passengers who board one of these small airlines, slightly more than four will die. And this represents an improvement from the period before 1978, when, after six years of wrangling, there was a moderate tightening of the safety regulations governing most small airlines. Between 1970 and 1978, more than 13 people died for every one million passengers who boarded the smallest two-thirds of the commuter airlines.

And people are increasingly flying the commuters. Since deregulation dozens of newcomers opened up shop to take advantage of the void left by the majors . In 1978 there were 228 commuters operating, flying a total of some 1.13 million hours. By 1981 some 246 commuters were operating, flying 1.99 million hours. As the 1980s progressed, many of the smallest operators found it difficult to stay in business, despite the rapid increase in industry-wide volume. As of 1987, the average number of passengers each minor airline served had quadrupled from ten years ago, to nearly 190,000, although the number of carriers was down to 169. Analysts predict the number of airlines will continue to slowly drop, while the number of passengers, largely unaware of the commuters second-rate safety record, will continue to rise rapidly.

So while the chances of catastrophe might be less than one in a million for the jet-weary, the risk is much greater for the traveling seed salesman going from one small town to another, or for the family using a commuter airline as a "spoke" to get to a major airline "hub," which has become the prevailing industry practice for linking small towns to big towns and beyond. Or to compare the commuters in terms of the major airlines, as the Aviation Safety Commission did this April: "Despite improvements since deregulation, regional air travel remains more risky than jet travel, by more than a factor of three in terms of fatalities and more than a factor of...