Day-to-day risk as perceived by line pilots.
To reduce the accident rate to the target by changing individual crew member attitudes through generalised CRM training, it would be necessary to improve crew member "quality" overall by nearly an order of magnitude. But most crews already operate in what they believe to be a very safe manner - most airline pilots would rate their work as being considerably safer than many other aspects of their lives such as driving to the airport. It is certainly safer than most other types of aviation.
- A pilot flying a 35 year career with a high efficiency short-haul airline, operating 1000 hours per annum on 1 hour sectors, would fly 35,000 flights in his entire career.
- A pilot with a short (say 15 year) career with an inefficient, ultra-long haul airline, flying 700 hours a year on 14 hour average sectors would fly 750 flights in his entire career.
- Within these extremes, a typical pilot might be taken as having a 10,000 to 15,000 flight career exposure.
- The global accident rate is broadly 1 accident per million flights.
- It is generally accepted that for every accident there are a number of serious incidents and a larger number of less serious events.
- If each accident is associated with 20 serious incidents, and each serious incident with 50 minor ones, there would be 1000 minor events per accident, or one per 1000 flights.
The typical pilot in a two-crew environment might therefore see 20 or so such events in his career, and at realistic actual exposure rates, this could actually be between say one or two a year to one a decade. Most of these are of course relatively minor events from all causes, the vast majority of which would not only NOT be "crew caused", but in fact are events due to other causes which the crew had successfully PREVENTED from becoming more serious events.