Air Transport Industry

SCM Project
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SCM Project
Abstract
Air transport industry is one of the fastest means of transport in the world. People travel for leisure, commerce, medical services, escape, adventure or recreation, etc. However, the means has its own limitations. Air travel accidents can be catastrophic to the environment and human beings. The focus of this study is air accidents due to crashing. Data obtained from the WAAS database between 1990 and 2006 will be used in the investigation. All data shall be analyzed using IBM, SPSS, and Microsoft Excel and then later presented in pie charts, ANOVA tables, and test statistics. The only challenge was getting data from WAAS directly. For that reason, the only option was to use figures published by the Ascend database on behalf of WAAS. Besides that, the NTSB data published by planecrashinfo.database will provide aircraft accidents’ data in decades (the 1960s to 2000s).
Keywords: Aircraft, air travel, transport, crashes, IBM SPSS, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS), Ascend, Federal Aviation Administration to Augment (FAAA), black boxes, inflight judgment, on-ground judgment, NTSB, and sabotage.
Introduction
The transport industry has evolved over the last fifty years. The main means of transport in the world are air, water, land, and rail. Arguably, these modes of transport have eased the movement of goods, animals, and people. Each of these means of transport has its own pros and cons. People travel for different reasons, such as leisure, adventure, discovery, medical services, business or commerce, escape, etc. The usual disadvantage of any means is when an accident occurs. The result can be catastrophically disastrous leading to injury, loss or damage of the vessel, and sometimes loss of lives. The focus of this paper is the causes of air travel accidents.
With the new improved time-saving and safety techniques, air transport has remained dynamic and renowned as the fastest means of transport. However, on the occasion of an accident, the chances of survival are close to minimal. Dreadful as they feel when mentioned, air travel accidents still occur even with the new improved measures bound to prevent the cause of another accident. Aircraft investigations are difficult to assess within a short period of time due to the magnitude of items engineers have to check before finalizing a full report on the accident. In the recent past, aircraft crashes have occurred and left no survivors. For instance, on 10th March 2019, the Ethiopian Boeing 787 Max 8 crashed 6 minutes after take-off and killing all 157 on board. Similarly, on 29th October 2018, the Indonesian Lion Air 610 crashed 12 minutes after take-off and all 189 died. Upon the retrieval of their black boxes, investigations as to why the aircrafts crashed are still ongoing.
The air navigation aid WAAS is a system that uses GPS and developed by the FAA and used in the precision of flight approaches. The system is installed in every aircraft, thus helping the pilot to navigate in lower altitudes. Conversely, NTSB is an agency based in the United States of America (USA) whose major role is to enhance transportation safety, help out victims and their families in case of an accident. Moreover, it helps in examining accidents, thus coming up with the probable cause of occurrence. In general, both WAAS and NTSB maintain records of accidents. Unlike NTSB, WAAS has all information about an aircraft’s altitude, runway distance, course guidance, elevation at all angles of the approach, and weather conditions at minimum range. According to the information provided on the WAAS website, this paper will only be focused on the 700 air accidents that occurred between the year 1990 and 2006. We will investigate the hypothesis that 40 percent of most aircraft accidents occur due to pilot error and whether the data provided by WAAS is relevant.
Data Analysis
The following is a WAAS summarised list of all accidents categorized into the cause of the crash that happened during the 16 years (1990-2006).
Sometimes the cause of the accident could not be established due to the total destruction of evidence, difficult retrieval of any material to investigate the cause or unclear information from the Ascend database. These cases were categorized into ‘other’. Arguably, the pilot error could be because of many things (Beech & Bradsher, 2018). The table below shows the different types of pilot error and the number of accid...