Airlines as Baseball Players: Another Approach for Evaluating an Equal-Safety Hypothesis

Airlines as Baseball Players: Another Approach for Evaluating an Equal-Safety Hypothesis David Czerwinski, Arnold Barnett Business leaders routinely seek to apply best practices, but they want clear evidence that a particular practice is superior to available alternatives. However, in the context of safety among entities like airlines or chemical plants, major disasters are extremely rare, which is making it difficult to verify that some organizations (and their procedures) genuinely outperform their competitors. In this paper, we address this issue by adapting to aviation safety a technique used by the Oakland Athletics Major League baseball team to evaluate baseball players. Used in conjunction with other methods, the “baseball” analysis provides insight into the safety of U.S. airlines. Similar analyses might be helpful in other domains such as industrial production, land transportation, and natural hazards.