每日英语外刊阅读 研究：为什么苦苦挣扎的航空公司在安全方面花费更多

Every airline worth its salt claims to value passengersafety over and above all else. But, realistically, airlines must balance theoften-conflicting imperatives of safety and profitability. Inevitably, momentswill arise where executives ask not, “How safe can we possibly be?” but “Howsafe must we be?” or “How safe can we afford tobe?” These tough, troubling questions are an inescapable fact of doing businessin an industry centered around potentially hazardous technology.

In our forthcoming article in OrganizationScience we describe our research into airlines’ management of thesecomplex trade-offs and, in particular, how financial performance affects anairline’s focus on safety. When we began our research, our assumption was thatthe most successful airlines (those with secure profitability) would be leadingthe pack on the safety front — and this overall view is supported by previous research. But in our work,we specifically examined when airlines decided to replace particular aircraft.In this particular context we found instead that airlines with lower profitabilitywere more likely to choose to invest in new aircraft after a crash of a modelin their fleet — like that of the Boeing 737 Max 8 recently—even if the flight was not being operated by that airline.

Altering the composition of the fleet – replacingolder models of aircraft that have less-than-stellar accident records withmodels considered to be very safe – is one of the ways top-level airlinemanagement can improve safety. As one might expect, these transactions usuallyinvolve selling at a discount and buying at a premium. This means the airlineloses out financially on the deal.

To track aircraft sales and purchases, we obtainedfleet composition statistics via the website www.airfleets.net, which features fulldata on passenger aircraft across the entire industry. From the same website,we accessed accident records for all global airlines, which we narrowed down toincidents resulting in an airplane being deemed permanently unfit to fly. Thiscategory of mishap (termed “hull loss accidents”) includes tragic crashes, ofcourse, but also serious electrical fires, water landings, and any other eventrendering repairs either futile or too costly. We also assessed the tenor ofmedia coverage for each aircraft model in the sample, as we assumed that thepublicity around the planes would affect fleet management decisions. Ahigh-profile accident that was widely reported would have an outsized impact onairlines’ safety-based calculus.

Then we traced the connections between the changingcomposition of an airline’s fleet and its commercial fortunes (though beforedoing so we had to filter out of our sample many smaller airlines in developingcountries for which reliable financial performance data could not be obtained).

We found that airlines with above-average safetyrecords responded to increased accident rates of models in their fleet bychanging their fleet composition. But, interestingly, this effect was strongerfor airlines with a lower level of profitability. Suppose that two airlinesstart with an equally high above-average safety but differing levels ofprofitability. If they both experience a same-size reduction in the safetyrating, the low-profit airline would on average increase its aircraft sales by55% as compared to the high-profit airline, which would only increase itsaircraft sales by 29%. And among airlines with relatively high accident rates,financial performance played an even more decisive role: Underperformingcarriers disposed of aircraft in a bid to improve safety, but the prosperousones did not bother. For airlines equally far below the industry average safetyrecord, an airline with low profitability is 50% more likely to sell aircraftthan the one with high profitability.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, thatIndonesia’s Lion Air is reportedly planningto drop a $22 billion order for 737 Max aircraft in favor of Airbus planesfollowing both the recent Ethiopia Air crash and its own tragedy in Octoberlast year when one of its own Max jets crashed minutes aftertakeoff killing all passengers and crew.

It might seem strange that financially strugglingairlines are the most willing to spend more on safety, but we believe that ithas to do with the way organizations think about survival: Airlines whoseprofits are riding high can survive a scandal, and their executives know it.Their less successful peers may already be bordering on failure and could illafford the public outcry that a prominent accident would cause.

It’s also worth noting that the buying and selling ofaircraft for safety’s sake was influenced mostly by accident rates, but mediatenor was a significant factor too. Take the barrage of negative press coveragesurrounding the Boeing 787 Dreamliner following a series of battery fires in2013 and 2014. Even though the worst initial fires happened whilethe planes were recharging on the runway without any passengers on board, acloud of suspicion shadows the Dreamliner to this day. Correspondingly, wefound that negative press exerted its own influence on aircraft sales andpurchases, independent of actual hull loss rates. Public perception of thesafety and actual safety records of aircraft appear to be two separate boxesthat carriers feel compelled to tick, especially in economically lean times.

So are industry-leading carriers less safe than theunderdogs? Not quite. We know from the previous studies mentionedearlier that there is in fact a direct correlation between airlines’profitability and their safety record. Safety is affected by more than just themakes and models of aircraft in the fleet; what employees do on the ground andin flight arguably matters more. Putting safety first often comes down toquestions like: Are best practices being scrupulously followed? Are flight crewgiven time to perform sufficiently thorough checks before takeoff? And whenprofits are down and pay raises scarce, the temptation to cut corners can bestrong enough to neutralize the prudent plans of the C-suite. No matter howmany suspect planes an airline puts out of commission, if managers do nottackle these issues, safety will still be a problem.

Our findings show that, their impact notwithstanding,the choices managers make in navigating tough trade-offs like safety versusprofitability will change based on context. When the stakes – in both financialand human terms – are high, decision-makers safety over profitability, choosingpricey survival over low-cost risk.

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