When Outcomes are not Enough: An Examination of Abductive and Deductive Logical Approaches to Risk Analysis in Aviation.

Abstract

While airlines generate massive amounts of operational data every year, the ability to use the collected material to improve safety has begun to plateau. With the increasing demand for air travel, the aviation industry is continually growing while simultaneously being required to ensure the level of safety within the system remains constant. The purpose of this article is to explore whether the traditional analysis methods that have historically made aviation ultra-safe have reached their theoretical limits or merely practical ones. This analysis argues that the underlying logic governing the traditional (and current) approaches to assess safety and risk within aviation (and other safety critical systems) is abductive and therefore focused on creating explanations rather than predictions. While the current fly-fix-fly approach has, and will continue to be, instrumental in improving what (clearly) fails, alternative methods are needed to determine if a specific operation is more or less risky than others. As the system grows, so too does the number of ways it can fail, creating the possibility that more novel accidents may occur. The article concludes by proposing an alternative approach that explicitly adds temporality to the concepts of safety and risk. With this addition, a deductive analysis approach can be adopted which, while low in explanatory power, can be used to create predictions that are not bound to analyzing only outcomes that have occurred in the past but instead focuses on determining the deviation magnitude between the operation under analysis and historically commensurate operations.