AN APPLICATION OF BOX-JENKINS ARIMA TECHNIQUES TO AIRLINE SAFETY DATA

This article examines the impact of deregulation on airline safety using Box-Jenkins ARIMA modeling techniques. The author measures airline safety in terms of fatalities, fatal accidents and accidents, normalized by million passenger miles, million miles flown and millions of departures. The data covers all U.S. commercial airline operations, including commuter airlines. For each of the measures, after correcting for the general trend over time of greater safety, the study found a statistically significant association between deregulation and safety. The significant association takes the form of two trends: one toward greater airline safety and a second toward less safety at one or more lag periods after deregulation. Overall, air travel was safer after deregulation than it would have been had the previous regulatory environment continued.