This type of research is highly valuable but too rare; this is generally because of how we view Road Accidents at a core level:
- Road Accidents: "A driver caused this, let's determine who, and find them at fault."
- With Air Accidents: "The system caused this, let's determine which elements came together that ultimately lead to this event."
The first is essentially simplifying a complex series of events into something black and white. Easy to digest. We'll then keep doing it over and over again because we never changed the circumstances.
The second approach is holistic, for example even if the pilot made a mistake, why did they make a mistake, and what can we do to prevent that mistake (e.g. training, culture, etc)? But maybe other elements also played a part like mechanical, software, airport lightning, communications, etc.
I bet everyone reading this knows of a road near them that is an accident hotspot and I bet they can explain WHY it is. I certainly do/can, and I see cops with crashed cars there on a weekly basis. Zero changes have been made to the conditions.
Because for air travel we pre filter out the morons who are drunk, untrained, scrolling facebook, etc. Any incident left is overwhelmingly more likely a systems issue. For a road incident, the most likely cause was just one driver was violating one or more rules. The only system failure was not canceling their license beforehand.
While that is true, "Drivers consistently ignoring rules" is also a systems issue, which can be mitigated through e.g. better road design (narrower roads reduce speeding, for example).
Fortunately deaths are only a fraction of the accidents though, and it's not even necessarily the kind of accident that bothers insurance companies the most as long as the driver only kills himself.
> The only system failure was not canceling their license beforehand.
Why was their license not canceled beforehand?
Did they not get caught? If so, why? Likely other drivers have noticed the bad driving behavior. If so, why did they not report it? If they did report it, did the reports get ignored? Is there even a system and process in place for such reporting?
If they got caught, was there hesitation to revoke their license? If so, why? A potential factor would be driving in an area where you have to drive to get anywhere, which is common in the US. Why has it not been addressed that you have to drive, even if your driving habits are bad?
If bad driving behavior is too hard to punish, why? If regulations do not allow adequate punishment of bad driving behavior, why have these regulations not been changed? If evidence is missing, what evidence would that be, and how could it be collected?
If the driver was drunk, what would have been the alternative to driving? Is there adequate public transportation for drunks to get home? "adequate" depends on the drinking culture in the area where that happened.
If the driver was untrained, why were they allowed to drive? You wrote about canceling their license, so they did get a license. How was that possible without training? Does the process for handing out licenses have to be changed? Is frequent re-training necessary (more data is needed for that; if that data isn't avilable, why not?)
An issue of volume, I would guess. If my quickly gathered stats are accurate, there are on the order of 100K commercial flights every day, and 1B drives. So road accidents are expected to be more numerous, and they usually have less impact than an airliner going down. Also - the NTSB does indeed investigate car accidents on occasion, and when they do, they definitely include systemic analysis.
- Road Accidents: "A driver caused this, let's determine who, and find them at fault."
- With Air Accidents: "The system caused this, let's determine which elements came together that ultimately lead to this event."
The first is essentially simplifying a complex series of events into something black and white. Easy to digest. We'll then keep doing it over and over again because we never changed the circumstances.
The second approach is holistic, for example even if the pilot made a mistake, why did they make a mistake, and what can we do to prevent that mistake (e.g. training, culture, etc)? But maybe other elements also played a part like mechanical, software, airport lightning, communications, etc.
I bet everyone reading this knows of a road near them that is an accident hotspot and I bet they can explain WHY it is. I certainly do/can, and I see cops with crashed cars there on a weekly basis. Zero changes have been made to the conditions.