Daily Archives: January 2, 2019

January 2, 2019 · 1:15 pm

Aviation safety evolution (2018 update)

Yesterday, the Aviation Safety Network released the 2018 airliner accident statistics showing a total of 15 fatal airliner accidents, resulting in 556 fatalities.

Aviation Safety Network is a private initiative from the Flight Safety Foundation which curates an extensive database with aviation incidents, hijackings and accidents, from 1946 to nowadays.

The tweet with which they made the announcement is below:

Which includes the graphic below.

ASN_infographic_2018.

If we take a quick look at the figures (which report commercial aviation flights (passenger and cargo)):

  • Number of accidents: 15, up from 10 in 2017, though still the 3rd safest year in history.
  • Fatalities: 556, up from 44 in 2017, the 9th safest year in history.
  • There were a few accidents with large number of fatalities (details here).

The graphic above from the Aviation Safety Network provides the view of the evolution of accidents. However, in their database they provide some more figures with which I produced some graphics.

Evolution of accidents per million flights

The database provides figures of the evolution of the number of world air departures since 1970, together with the evolution of accidents (above). The database includes a ratio: fatal accidents per million flights, which I have plotted below together with the evolution of flight departures. You can see that the ratio has decreased 16 fold since 1970, from 6.35 to 0.39 last year.

2018_safety_accidents_per_flights

Global air traffic vs fatalities

The database provides no ratio with the figures of fatalities, but they can be related to the amount of passengers carried. In aviation there is the concept of revenue passenger kilometre (RPK) transported, which is compiled year by year and can be found in publications from ICAO, IATA or aircraft manufacturers. I have plotted below both the evolution of traffic growth and fatalities since 1970, together with a 5-year moving average for the fatalities.

2018_safety_RPK_vs_fatalities

Within the evolution of traffic there are two variables that have grown over the years: the number of passengers carried per flight departure and the distance covered. Therefore, together with the decrease in the evolution of fatalities (taking the 5 year average) I have plotted below the evolution of the ratio of fatalities per trillion RPK. You can see that the ratio has decreased 54 fold since 1970, from 3,218 to 59 last year (5-year average).

2018_safety_fatalities_per_RPK

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January 2, 2019 · 12:04 am

Reading language, format and age of books (2018 update)

Three years ago, I wrote a couple of blog posts where I reflected on the mix of languages I used when reading books between English, French and Spanish and about the format of the books I read, whether electronic or paper books. In the past two years I have updated the figures in dedicated blog articles and this post, written after having shared last week my 2018 reading list, is just a follow up update of those two tables and a third one:

Reading language

Booksperlanguage_2018

From 2010 to mid-2015 I read mostly in English. From mid-2015 I have started to read more in Spanish than in the past (mainly classics) and in French. In terms of books the mix for 2018 was English 48%, French 26% and Spanish 26%. However, last year I thought that the mix would be better measured in terms of pages read, as the books can vary quite a bit in their length. Thus, in terms of pages: English 45%, French 23% and Spanish 32%. Since then I also compile that bit of information in a different table.

Pagesperlanguage_2018

Reading format

Booksperformat_2017

In 2018 I did not read any book in electronic format, all were in paper format. As I estimated here the amortization of the e-reader in about 20 e-books read with it, I am still just above half way through achieving that. I already anticipated it in the blog post from last year:

Seeing, the stock of paper books that I have in the shelves, I doubt that I will read many e-books in the near term.

Age of the books

Since 2016, I decided to focus more on reading classics and books that have aged well, i.e., that their impact on society has not faded after having made it to the best selling positions of the literature pages for the current the year. Thus, I try to limit the proportion of books that I read from the last 10 or 30 years. This can be tracked as well:

Booksperage_2018

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