Speaking of being objective, do you work for Southwest?
If you're worried about objectivity perhaps I can help, as I am a full-time A&P mechanic working on part 121, 125, 135 and 91 certificated cargo and passenger aircraft, who has no affiliation with Southwest.
Would I hesitate to fly on Southwest? No. Nor would I hesitate to fly on any major carrier world wide. One only needs to look into the numbers to understand why. Because statistically flying on any major airline is probably the safest activity I could be doing at any given time.
From the FAA,
"Every day, the FAA's Air Traffic Organization ( ATO ) provides service to more than 42,000 flights and 2.5 million airline passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace"
So an average of 2.5 million passengers every single day. Multiply that by the nearly 10 years without a fatality and you odds of being a fatality over 10 years are something like 1 in 9 billion (obviously decreasing odds the more often you fly, but you get the point) Just for context you odds of being killed by a lightning strike are 1 in 700,000, and the odds of being killed by a shark attack are 1 in 3.7 million.
Now just because the industry has achieved such an amazing safety record does not mean that the FAA and the companies they oversee aren't continually striving to do even better. That's what ticks me off so much when Chuck Schumer spouts off that FAA safety has "taken a nose-dive." with his only basis being that maintenance fines have dropped off.
As anyone in the industry can tell you fines have dropped because the FAA has learned that gathering good data for analysis is a far better proactive way to improve safety then simply fining the crap out of people and companies. Turns out people are less likely to admit an honest mistake or voice a safety concern when they're afraid of losing their career or costing the company millions of $$ over it. Voluntary disclosure programs like ASAP and NASA reports for individuals and VDRP and SMS programs for companies have made a way for individuals and companies to come forward with honest mistakes, close calls and safety concerns without worrying about losing their career, or crippling the company by doing so. The data and trends are collected, analyzed and shared among companies who use it to proactively improve safety.
