Don Watkins and Robert Hendershott
The safest way to travel is by air—and air travel has never been safer. MIT researchers found that from 1988 to 1997 there was one fatality per 1.3 million passenger boardings globally. From 2008 to 2017 that number had plummeted to one fatality per 7.9 million boardings.
“The worldwide risk of being killed had been dropping by a factor of two every decade,” says Arnold Barnett, an MIT scholar who has published a new paper summarizing the study’s results. “Not only has that continued in the last decade, the [latest] improvement is closer to a factor of three. The pace of improvement has not slackened at all even as flying has gotten ever safer and further gains become harder to achieve. That is really quite impressive and is important for people to bear in mind.”
In the U.S., the news is even better. There hasn’t been a single fatality from an airline crash in 12 years.
How is that possible? It’s certainly not that the human beings in the airline industry are infallible, or that their task is an easy one. Instead, the answer comes down to how they’ve dealt with failure: namely, they’ve actively created an environment that allows them, even requires them, to learn from it.
You’ve probably heard about black boxes, which record data from airplanes so that in the event of a crash, analysts can piece together what went wrong, understand why things went wrong, and develop procedures to avoid repeating the mistakes. But that is only part of the story. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?