One of the biggest fears that airline executives have will most probably be an accident. With the internet and social media, images of an airliner physically damaged with the company livery and logo can be transmitted around the world instantaneously.
In the aviation industry, we do our best to learn from mistakes and prevent the same accidents from happening again. However, how does an accident affect passengers’ confidence in the airline? With visuals flashing on the nightly news, front pages on newspapers and on the internet, will it affect passengers in buying a ticket on that particular airline?
Asiana Airlines Flight OZ214 is a good example to attempt to answer this question. It is an unfortunate accident involving the Boeing 777 aircraft. It is the first accident on the Boeing 777 which resulted in fatalities. It is only the third 777 that resulted in a total loss of the aircraft or in aviation jargon, a hull-loss. Due to the nature of the crash, numerous visuals were shared on social media and even live images were broadcasted on the nightly news with the aircraft smothered in smoke lying helplessly on the runway. There were even a video footage showing the moment the aircraft crashed on approach. During the aftermath of the accident, the National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, was very active in updating the public regarding the investigation on social media and news outlets. On June 24, 2014, the NTSB released the final report stating that the flight crew mismanaged the approach. In other words, it was pilot error that caused the accident.
A severe aviation accident involving a 5 star SKYTRAX airline on a modern aircraft. How will passengers react to such an accident?
Given that the accident happened on a flight that has a final destination in the United States, as per the Federal Aviation Regulation, domestic and international airlines conducting these flights will needs to submit numerous statistical data to the United States Department of Transport. These statistical data includes monthly passenger numbers. I will use the data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistic under the DOT, to look at how the accident affected the passenger loads to and from ICN/SFO on Asiana Airlines and two other airlines that conducted this city pair; Korean Air Lines and United Air Lines.
The accident of OZ214 happened on 6 July 2013. As shown on the graphs, passengers loads from ICN-SFO were less affected than flights from SFO-ICN. Just purely by looking at the monthly load factor percentages, August passengers’ loading from SFO-ICN were in obvious decline compared to 2012 and 2014 where it is still the summer peak for the industry. The loading continued to decline into September where historically is a slower month for the industry in general. Surprising the load factor improved significantly on October and into 2014 where the load factors resume its normal peaks and troughs of the airline industry low and peak seasons.
I’ve wanted to further look into how the ICN-USA sectors performed as a whole. The above graph includes all ICN to USA city pairs (SEA/SFO/LAX/ORD/JFK). There were a significant drop in load factor for the month of September in 2012 similar to what we have found in the ICN-SFO sector but again load factors improved significantly soon after September and into November and 2014. In fact for 2014 as a whole, load factors has been higher than the previous year and in 2012.
Looking at both Korean Air Lines and United Air Lines that served this city pair direct and in direct competition with Asiana Airlines on this route, one interesting finding that came out from the graphs was August 2013 load factors. SFO-ICN August 2013 load factors is significantly higher than of Asiana Airlines. Were there some passengers that leaked to these two airlines? However, the accident itself does not seem to have any affect on these two airlines.
Although, no statistical tools were used to statistically analyze the data; I believe we can draw a few causal conclusions from purely looking at the load factors and the graphs above.
1.) To answer the question, does an airline accident affect passenger loads and confidence? Using OZ214 as an example, the simple answer is YES but for only a very short period of time. If any, passenger loads were affected in August after the accident but only more so for SFO-ICN sector compared to the ICN-SFO sector. Passenger loads improved significantly afterwards and into 2014.
2.) As the official NTSB report was issued in June 2014, ICN-SFO sector continued to be strong in the 1st, 2nd and into the 3rd quarter of 2014.
Questions from these data:
1.) There is a significant flow in-balance between ICN-SFO/SFO-ICN sector. The only answer that I may come up with is ICN-SFO carries more on wards traffic to SFO from Asiana Airlines network and alliance.
2.) I am surprised that passengers were not affected more by this event and how quickly passenger loads rebounded from this accident. It may be obvious to passengers that flying is still the safest form of transport. Although, in this case, there is not much alternative if you want to travel across the Pacific.