And on the NTSB's 40th...

After 40 years of phone-calls conveying nothing but bad news, the nowadays outcome has indisputably been nothing but good news from an aviation safety perspective. On 01 April 1967, when the Bureau of Safety was removed from the Civil Aeronautics Board, a non-regulatory agency was set up to bulldog safety. The new accident investigation agency, our celebrated NTSB, has since followed up thousands of mishaps in the highway, rail, marine and pipeline field but is best known for its work in aviation. Although it gets by with less than 400 employees, the agency looks at over 2000 accidents per annum. In the 40 years of its existence the NTSB has offered up 12,600 safety recommendations and claims that 82 percent of those have been implemented.

As a stark measure of the success of technology and investigation in producing safer air transportation, the NTSB's chairman pointed out that "If the air carrier accident rate were the same today as it was in 1965, the United States would be averaging a fatal airliner accident every 10 days." Further emphasizing the turnaround in rates, Chairman Mark Rosenker pointed out that no year since 1990 had seen more than 4 fatal scheduled air carrier accidents in the United States and that the annual number of general aviation crashes had dropped by two thirds in the last 40 years. The FAA may talk incessantly about "raising the safety bar", but aviation insiders know that it's actually the bulldog turned watchdog that's holding it up there.