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

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