English

Time-evolving distribution of time lags between commercial airline disasters

Physics and Society 2007-06-13 v1

Abstract

We have studied the time lags between commercial line airplane disasters and their occurrence frequency till 2002, as obtained from a freely available website. We show that the time lags seem to be well described by Poisson random events, where the average events rate is itself a function of time, i.e. time-dependent Poisson events. This is likely due to the unsteady growth of the industry. The time lag distribution is compared with a truncated Tsallis distribution, thereby showing that the ''phenomenon'' has similarities with a Brownian particle with time dependent mass. We distinguish between ''other causes'' (or natural causes) and ''terrorism acts", the latter amounts to about 5 percents, but we find no drastic difference nor impact due to the latter on the overall distribution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.physics/0509092,
  title  = {Time-evolving distribution of time lags between commercial airline disasters},
  author = {M. Ausloos and R. Lambiotte},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0509092},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

24 refs, 22 pages, 9 figures to be published in physica a