Amazing Safety Record

It has now been four years since a commercial airline last suffered a fatal crash. This is an amazing and unprecedented accomplishment. And, as the February 12 New York Times reports, it is, in part, due to increased communication and collaboration among pilots, airlines, and regulators who have gotten much better at sharing information regarding flying hazards. Apparently, back in the mid-1990s when there was a series of commercial airliner accidents, the F.A.A., airlines and pilot organizations began to participate in a concerted process of sharing safety concerns, with the idea that this sharing would be entirely open and would be conducted solely to promote safety, not to discipline airlines or pilots. A web-based system eventually followed, which incorporates information from virtually all commercial airlines.

The lesson, it seems to me, is simple: the more information the better. Allowing all the voices to be heard and creating a mechanism for organizing and acting on all those voices is making a tremendous difference. This is another example of democracy at work.

You may be aware of the groundbreaking work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who won the award in 1998, primarily for his work claiming that famines do not happen in functioning democracies where two phenomena, in particular, are at work. First is the fact that leaders and public officials must be accountable to their constituents and so cannot afford to let widespread hunger persist. Second, and more important, is the argument that democracies allow information to flow more freely than in non-democracies, which means that democracies are better at getting the food to people who need it.

Is the claim flawed? Of course. For instance, we know that food insecurity continues to plague the U.S., but the reasons have more to do with a lack of political will than the availability of information about where hungry people reside.

The principle, nevertheless, holds true. Democracy, a free flow of information, and multiple and unrestricted outlets for sharing information are one of the keys to solving our most daunting problems. The current safety record of the airline industry is a shining example of this.