Flying While Broke

Update: due to popular demand, we've added a chart of commercial airline accidents per million departures after the jump. There seems to be no real link to recession years using that data, either.

Do recessions lead to airplane crashes?

Investigators looking into the disappearance of an Air France flight over the Atlantic last week believe the jet's airspeed indicator failed. Airbus, the manufacturer of the plane, had recently recommended that Air France replace the parts that calculate airspeed, but Air France hadn't completed the work yet.

Air France's stock has been hurting since last year, as it suffers along with the rest of the air industry. That's caused some to wonder whether the economic downturn — and the cost-cutting that goes with it — will make flying more dangerous.

Using stats from Air Disaster, a website that pulls in data from the Federal Aviation Administration, I plotted the number of commercial airline accidents during past American recessions above, through 2004. If you see a pattern, let us know — because I don't.

Bloomberg reports today that the global airline industry is set to lose $9 billion in 2009. But these loses aren't likely to impact safety, according to Gary Northam, the chair of the Safety Science Department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Northam told me it's more likely that Air France just hadn't gotten around to swapping out those airspeed parts. "You can't change out every one of those parts immediately," he said. "It just takes a long time."