Ron Garret writes:

In article ,
David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

Dylan Smith writes:

On 2005-08-16, wrote:
The other day I'd read about a close call at Boston Logan and another
at JFK within the last month or so and it got me thinking how close we
might be to a major airline accident in the US(yikes!).

The other crashes do not affect the probability of a crash in the US. It
is inevitable that eventually there will be a major airline accident in
the US.

Look at the NTSB reports - minor incidents and close calls are quite a
common occurance in the US.

And the length of time since the last one has no impact on the chances
of one any given day. We're talking about what statisticians call
"independent events".

That's not necessarily true. There could be some systematic underlying
cause resulting in an increased risk of crashes. It seems unlikely in
this case (or these cases), but you can't rule it out a priori.

Yeah, I thought of trying to complicate the explanation to that
extent, but since it didn't apply to the most immediate bit of the
discussion (no apparent common mode) I left it out to keep things
simple.
--
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