Airline Incidents: How Do Boeing and Airbus Compare?
Airline Incidents: How Do Boeing and Airbus Compare?
This graphic shows U.S. airline incidents across the two largest aircraft manufacturers in the world as Boeing faces increased scrutiny.
I'm reluctant to upvote this, since it's leaving out a lot of rather important caveats about the dataset. This depiction is presented as "the number of aviation incidents between the two giants since 2014 in the U.S. and international waters". Here, "international waters" means the regions of the North Pacific Ocean, north Atlantic Ocean, and Gulf of Mexico, whose airspace services are delegated by ICAO to the United States, administered by the FAA. It's not US airspace, but it's administered as if it was, meaning accident reports get filed with FAA and NTSB, the source of this data.
The other caveat is that the total size of the Boeing fleet flying through FAA-administered airspace versus the total Airbus fleet is closer to 2-to-1, with nearly twice as many Boeing aircraft as Airbus aircraft, using 2018 estimates. This is including all the aircraft which US airliners currently operate, not just the newest ones they've bought in recent years.
Finally, in the reporting parlance, an aircraft "incident" means a non-serious injury event that happened. If major injuries or death occurred, that would be an "aircraft accident". So an incident could include anything like:
- Returning to the airport because of an unruly passenger
- Another aircraft getting too close but not requiring evasive manoeuvres (aka minimum separation violation)
- Overspeeding of the aircraft, such as exceeding 250 knots while still below 10,000 ft
- An engine failure
- A door plug falling off, causing minor injuries to three people but no deaths
- A passenger getting their arm stuck in the toilet while reaching for their dropped phone
What reasons could Boeing aircraft have more incidents? Sure, they might be shoddily assembled. But it could also be a matter of fleet distribution: if Boeing makes more wide-body aircraft than Airbus, and thus carry more passengers, then passenger-related incidents would be higher represented for Boeing aircraft. Suffice it to say, this single graphic isn't giving enough depth to a complicated situation.
That's very interesting, thank you! From the article it seemed that both company shared the same market cap in term of number of planes, but your message explain the caveats of it, thanks again
Would be helpful to compare fleet sizes, how many accidents per total flights. Total accidents doesn't mean much without a comparison of either those stats.