Archive for in-flight deaths
faster no more! [flybeen]
Posted in pictures, Travel with tags Air France, Birmingham, Cardiff, flight mode, FlyBe, Glasgow, in-flight deaths, lost luggage on March 11, 2020 by xi'an
bad graphics and poor statistics
Posted in Statistics with tags airlines, awful graphs, bad graph, giant rabbit, in-flight deaths, pets, The Guardian, travel deaths, US airlines on February 21, 2018 by xi'an
Reading through The Guardian website, I came across this terrible graphic about US airlines 2016 comparison for killing pests pets they carry. Beyond the gross imprecision resulting from resorting to a (gross) dead dog scale to report integers, the impression of Hawaiian Airlines having a beef with pets is just misleading: there were three animal deaths on this company for that year. And nine on United Airlines (including the late giant rabbit). The law of small numbers in action! Computing a basic p-value (!) based on a Poisson approximation (the most pet friendly distribution) does not even exclude Hawaiian Airlines. Without even considering the possibility that, among the half-million plus pets travelling on US airlines in 2016, some would have died anyway but it happened during a flight. (As a comparison, there are “between 114 and 360 medical” in-flight [human] deaths per year. For it’s worth.) The scariest part of The Guardian article [beyond the reliance on terrible graphs!] is the call to end up pets travelling as cargo, meaning they would join their owner in the cabin. As if stag and hen [parties] were not enough of a travelling nuisance..!
