Egypt Air Flight 990 Boeing 767 that crashed off the US Atlantic Coast while on a routine flight from JFK to Cairo. I still today remember the first time I set foot on the exact same plane back in 1997. That very second you enter the plane, you feel you are in Egypt. I remember the voice of the Captain reciting Quran during taxi, the music of Rafaat Al-Hagan filling the plane during embarkation (composer Ammar Al-Sharie picture top), and the Egyptian air attendants who to me looked as if they were coming alive from a Mahmoud Said portrait of Egyptian girls (Banat Bahari or "Coastal Girls", Center).
It is not my intention here to recall the media frenzy and the accusations exchanged across the Atlantic. That was a foreshadow of the "war on terror" and a neglected sign of the yawning cultural gap that is becoming now a clash of civilizations. Neither will I get into technical discussions about the plane's thrust reversers or Al-Batouti's personal life. Instead, we go about doing some basic statistical analysis that we will find at the end to be quite revealing.
Data...Data...and More Data
Accident rate of Egypt Air compared to other airlines in Africa and the Middle East. Only Air Zimbabwe and Royal Jordanian is worse than Egypt Air! Accident rate is the most fundamental metric that any airline should keep an eye on. This should come before service quality or even on-time arrival and departure.
Relationship between Accident Rate and Country's GDP: To address the typical Egyptian government low income excuse, I plotted the airline accident rate vs. the country's GDP. The graph shows the following patterns:
(1) The United States leads the world in airline safety except for the new low cost carriers (Air Tran, which is the only one we have data for).
(2) The US is followed by Western Europe and Japan where there is quite a bit of variability but they are all share an accident rate that is less than 4 per million flights.
(3) Sliding toward lower income countries (to the left of the graph), we hit Gulf Arab airlines whose accident rate is comparable to the best in the world.
(4) Moving more to the left, we start to hit lower income countries where there is some trend of increasing average accident rate with declining income. However, more than 80% of all low-income countries have an accident rate that is lower than 5. Only outliners such as Egypt Air have a higher accident rate.
Therefore, the Egyptian government low-income excuse account for only an accident rte of 5. The additional 3 accidents per million flights that Egypt Air has cannot be explained by low income or unavailable resources. There is something else and as we will discover later it is mostly neglect and incompetence.
Airplanes Accident Rate Data: Most airplanes in the world have great safety track record. This is most likely explained by the significant entry barrier to become an airplane manufacturer and the tough safety regulations and oversight in the manufacturing countries. Compare that to the relatively smaller entry barrier to become an airline. Any government in the world can create its own airline.
After collecting all the data, we turn next to analyzing the data.
Let us first look at the histogram of accident rates and airlines. The histogram shows that Egypt Air with accident rate = 8 is in the worst 10% of the population of all airlines around the world.
Historgram of World Airlines. Sad to say that Egypt Air ranks in the worst 10% of all world airlines.
1- Royal Jordanian (8.82 accidents per million flights)
2- China Airlines (10.2)
3- Air Zimbabwe (12.5)
4- Aeroperu (16.7)
5- Cubana (24)
This is certainly not a distinguished place to be in. It is not exactly at the bottom of the barrel (as Cubana is) but is not really far away from that.
I asked myself, could it be that Egypt Air is just unlucky? Can it be that the Boeing 767 (the airplane equipment used for flight 990) is a bad model? Can it be that the Boeing 767 is just the culprit of airline accidents -- Egypt Air or otherwise?
With an accident rate of 0.46, the Boeing 767 has a solid track record for sure. It actually ranks # 3 among all airplanes, which makes it in the top 15%. Therefore, it cannot be that the Boeing 767 as a model is just a bad one. In fact, we could now ask the question: what is the probability that if an accident occurs on an Egypt Air Boeing 767, that the airline or the plane will be responsible…
We have some complication in answering this question. This is simply because the accident rate on Boeing 767 reflects all airlines using it whether good or bad, so the number we get there doesn’t represent the airplane responsibility itself, but the average of all users on that plane. Similarly, and to be fair, the accident rate on Egypt Air doesn’t mean that the airline itself is poor but can be that its airplanes themselves are poor.
To trace an answer to that question, we need to examine the accident rate of Egypt Air accident by accident and see the details of each one.
Here is the list of Egypt Air accidents:
2 January 1971; EgyptAir Comet4; Tripoli, Libya: The aircraft struck sand dunes four miles (6.4 km) from the runway during approach. All eight crew members and eight passengers were killed.
29 January 1973; EgyptAir Ilyushin 18; near Nicosia, Cyprus: The aircraft crashed into mountian during approach. All seven crew members and 30 passengers were killed.
25 December 1976; EgyptAir 707; Bangkok, Thailand: The aircraft crashed into a textile mill during approach. All nine crew members and 43 passengers were killed. Also killed were 20 people on the ground.
23 November 1985; Egyptair 737-200; Valletta, Malta: The aircraft was hijacked to Malta. After several hours of negotiations, Egyptian troops stormed the aircraft. During the ensuing battle, the hijackers threw several hand grenades. The aircraft was severely damaged by the explosions and fire. Two of the six crew members and 58 of the 90 passengers were killed.
10 June 1986; Air Sinai F27; Cairo, Egypt: Shortly before landing in reduced visibility, the crew reportedly attempted to go around. The crew lost control of the aircraft and crashed near the runway. All five crew members and 18 of the 21 passengers were killed.
31 October 1999; EgyptAir 767-300ER; Atlantic Ocean near Nantucket Island, MA: Radar and radio contact with the aircraft was lost shortly after the aircraft departed JFK Airport in New York on a flight to Cairo. The aircraft crashed into the ocean about 60 miles (96 km) south of Nantucket Island. The NTSB determined that the aircraft departed from controlled flight and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean as a result of flight control inputs by the first officer. All 14 crew members and 203 passengers were killed.
There is one more accident that belongs to Air Sinai which will be excluded in this analysis (even though Air Sinai is owned by Egypt Air). Also, there is an accident that resulted from hijacking and also will be discounted. That leaves 4 accidents since 1970.
Let us examine the airplanes themselves, they are 737-500, 767-300, Comet 4, and Illushyin 18. Let us take the planes one by one, starting with one accident that didn’t generate a lot of controversy; that is the B737 Egypt Air accident in Tunisia.
Egypt Air has a total of 0.75MM flights. The number of them on 737 is unknown but 737 is a popular model and it may represent the vast majority of the flights. To give Egypt Air all the benefit of the doubt, let us assume it represents 90% of the flights = 0.675 MM. Egypt Air had 1 accident on 0.675 MM flights representing an accident rate of 1.48 accidents per million flights.
However, Boeing 737 is used by a wide variety of airlines across the world. After all, it is the most popular airplane in the world. Of all the B737 users (whether good or bad operators), B737 had only 0.62 accident rate, or < ½ of the Egyptair accident rate. What is the probability that on the 0.675 MM flights that Egypt Air had of the 104.96 MM flight the world had on the B737 (with 0.62 accident rate) that Egypt Air will have 1 accident?
Historgram of World Aircrafts. With accidents rates of 0.62 per million flights, the Boeing 737 has one of the best safety records in the world.
That is an easier question to ask and we can answer that question as follows: Accidents happen usually following a Poisson distribution which Poisson discovered working for Napoleon to estimate the probability of a soldier being kicked by a horse! Assuming that accidents on a B737 follow the Poisson distribution with an accident rate = 0.62, what is the probability that over 0.675 MM flights, there will be less than 1 accident? That probability calculated according to the Poisson distribution ends up being 88-90%. What does that mean? That means that for all the universe of airlines using the Boeing 737 (out of which some are bad airlines and some are good airlines), approximately 90% of them will perform better than Egypt Air and have less than 1 accident given the same number of flights as Egypt Air had on the Boeing 737. If we realize that we inflated the number of flights that Egypt Air had on B737, it shows that if Egypt Air was an average operator of the B737, its probability of having an accident on its B737 fleet should be only 10-12%.
Things are not improving for Egypt Air so far. On average it is at the bottom 10% of all airlines. We thought initially that could be because it operates exceptionally bad planes. Therefore, we tried to look at specific accidents on Egypt air specific jets, which happened to be very popular by many airlines. In both cases (B737 and B767), Egypt Air had more accidents than 90% of the airlines operating those specific airplanes. It cannot be that Egypt Air is operating specifically bad airplanes. It has to be that Egypt Air is not a good operator and is truly at the bottom 10% of all operators.
But wait a second, it could be that Egypt Air just got unlucky on both the Boeing 767 and the Boeing 737 and got exceptionally bad planes in both cases. It could be that the model itself is good but the specific equipment was bad. It so happened that we can calculate the probability of that as well. Let us assume that all 3 B767 and all 57 B737 (number of accidents on both planes worldwide) were bad planes…had some form of malfunctioning and were not the operator problem but rather a Boeing problem. This is again a very conservative assumption, but one we will go along with for now to avoid distributing any blame on the airlines. There are 6000 B737 around the world, and there are more than 1000 B767 operating worldwide. If we assume all failures were related to Boeing. That means 57/6000 and 3/1000 bad airplanes. That is a failure rate of 0.95% and 0.3% respectively. This is for sure a low failure rate and corresponds to what is known in the industry as a 3 sigma process, so it is not necessarily a bad assumption that it is all Boeing’s fault, after all 3-sigma is not a bad industrial process. So, it is plausible that all B737 and B767 accidents were a manufacturer problem.
However, bak to Egypt Air. Egypt Air has to be so unlucky that when it took delivery of the B767, it took a bad plane and also when it took delivery of the B737 it still took a bad plane. The combined probability that Egypt Air took deliveries of bad planes in both cases is 0.3/100*0.95/100 = 28 per million. This cannot easily be accepted to be just lack of luck.
This probability is not zero, but it is very small. Egypt Air must be either incompetent with a probability of 90% or unlucky with a probability of 28 per million. I am trained in statistics and cannot reject the unlucky hypothesis. Someone may come years later and prove that Egypt Air was really unlucky and got bad deliveries in both cases. However, I am inclined to say for now it is just incompetence.
Now, it could be the Egypt Air 990 itself was not the result of incompetence and is truly something else: terrorism, deliberate act by the CIA or the Mossad to kill Egyptian officers onboard, suicidal tendancies of the pilot, ...whatever your flavor of the conspiracy theory is. I have no idea what exactly the true cause of Egypt Air 990 is. However what I am sure about now, is that Egypt Air is incompetent. Unfortunately, this is a fact that did not escape the US trial lawyers who used every bit of statistics to get Egypt Air to pay a hefty compensation package to the dead and injured. If Egypt Air had a better safety record, it could have been more difficult for those trial lawyers to extract the millions they did extract from the Egyptian treasury (finally all settlements were paid for by the Egyptian insurance company Misr Insurace which is owned by the Egyptian government, i.e., the Egyptian people paid for the neglect and incompetence).
The sad reality is that it is not only Egypt Air. The culture of neglect is so wide-spread in Egypt now that there is no respcet for rules, whether these rules are safety ones, engineering, or even the basic rule of law. Culture in Egypt is incredibly permissive of mistakes and errors. It doesn't take a genius to see all the train and road accidents that are becoming daily news in Egypt are really caused by a severe neglect of rules. There is also a complete lack of accountability and responsibility in many disciplines in the Egyptian society. I am sorry to shock you with this conclusion…however, as painful as it is, it still is reality, at least based on the scientific evidence.
Egypt Train Accidents Are Among the Highest in the World. After a series of them, President Mubarak told news reporters that the "accidents are because the train sector has been neglected for a long time and didn't receive proper investment levels. This is something that the government is working on now." Shortly after, the Egyptian minister of transportation declared in Al-Ahram that "investments are being directed now and that new locomotives are being bought and problem should be solved within 6 months." The minister also spoke of train electrification as the potential solution to the problem. This is the most wishful thinking in the world. Reasons are: (1) I cannot understand how new locomotives will avoid the head-on collisions that caused the recent series of accidents. (2) I checked with friends who manage sales and orders of Diesel locomotives in the American company that supplies most of Egypt's new locomotives. The shortest time to get a new locomotive is 1 year assuming all terms and conditions are agreed on. I don't understand how the minister will get his new locomotives! The saga continues and we should be waiting for another sad round of accidents!
I will not talk about road accidents and how disrespect for the rule of law is so widely spread on Egyptian streets (top and center pictures of road accidents in Egypt). Egyptian driving gets funny at least. I remember sitting next to a taxi driver who insisted that I put on the safety belt which was just a piece of cloth that didn't even buckle and lacked the safety coil so its only purpose would be to strangle me in case of an accident. The story didn't end there. The taxi driver broke almost every traffic rule I can remember including a red light, a stop sign, and a one-way street! I will not talk about that because it is becoming part of the Egyptian culture to have a street that more or less resembles a circus. But let me talk about something of far worse consequences: the oil industry. Egypt has a bad record of safety in an industry that is obssessed with safety. Picture above shows fire and explosion on an offshore platform off the Egyptian coast.
Another Example of Egyptian "Fahlawah" which is connected to the culture of neglect and disrespect for rule of law: 11 Egyptian exchange students destined for English courses in Minnesota ended up with friends and families in New York for several weeks apparently seeking to find jobs. Not knowing of course that the US has tightened its control of foreign students attendance in its uinversities and of course being Egyptians have triggered all kinds of security alarms at the FBI. The result is a big embarassment, dashed hopes, and a denied visa for lots of law-respecting Egyptians.
Let me take a little digression here. In the good old early days of Mubarak's presidency while hopes were high, there was a short song on Egyptian TV criticizing the culture of neglect. The song was named: "Maalish" (which translates to "It's OK") and the lyrics said: "For people who want to advance, they have to destroy Maalish." The song didn't last for long and obviously failed to achieve any of its objectives. The song was not bad, but it was a grim reminder that when you resort to songs, you really don't have anything else to offer. Unfortunately, things got worse because at least at that time we were willing to confront the difficult social and cultural problems. Now, we are just blaming the "chronic under-investment" in the transportation sector. Even if that is the case, mind you -- I beg your pardon, who is making these decisions? It is not the poor people whose fate led them to ride a 3rd class (terso as Egyptians say) Egyptian train?
Aside from the chronic culture of neglect in Egypt which the Egyptian government is unwilling to confornt its people with, there are things that could be done, particularly focusing on Egypt Air. The Egyptian government always accuses its critics that they don't offer solutions (as if the government does). Here are the elements of how Egypt Air at least could emerge:
Alliances such as SkyTeam include the the likes of Dutch KLM, French Air France, American Delta, Mexican AeroMexico, and Russian Aeroflot! All in one partnership! When I fly on SkyTeam, I go from a Delta flight in the US to an Alitalia flight to cross the Atlantic, to an Air France one to land in Paris, and finally to a Korean flight going to Seoul...and it all feels like I am on the same airline. These alliances open their respective markets to each other and offer significant joint venture advantages. These alliances are constant reminders to me how Eastern Europeans have made strides in the past 20 years while we stoodstill. There is a famous joke about Egyptian presidents and their car drivers: Upon assuming presidency, Mubarak asked his driver about his two predecesors and how they instructed him to drive from home to office.Nasser always asked to give left signal and only turn left. Sadat instructed to give left signal and then turn right. The driver said, so what do you want to do Mr. President. Mubarak asked his driver to give a right signal, then a left signal, then park in the same place.
Final word, true leaders lead cultural change to the better. Failed leaders either sit idle or change the culture to the worse. I cannot say that President Mubarak created a culture of neglect. I can say though that he sat idle. His son can give us all the long lectures he wants about the fruits of free economy. I do believe in every word Mr. Gamal says and I don't sleep during his lecture as a European ambassador did recently, but without confronting Egypt's cultural issues, to me, they are not true leaders.
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