FlySafe: Flight Safety Score

Let me break this down into simple terms as someone who works in the aviation industry. This app purports to use the following to tell you how safe your flight is: a score from 0-100 of Pilots, Maintenance, Aircraft, and Turbulence and an overview of similar accidents. First, the score of pilots is not publicly available data, nor should it be. All pilots are held to an extreme standard of safety, and no amount of data crunching can give you even an estimate of your pilots proficiency. The only way to know how safe a pilot is is to fly with them. There is literally no way for this app to tell you how safe your pilots are. They’re lying to you. And not just about pilots. Maintenance data is also company material. There is no way for people outside a company to know how well a maintenance professional services an aircraft without having another maintenance professional examine their work. Again, they are LYING when they say this is a statistic they can measure. Aircraft data in general can be helpful for exactly one purpose: discovering preexisting design faults such as those in the DC-10 and 737 MAX. However it’s worth noting that when design issues like these are found, they are FIXED. Once these issues are corrected, no aircraft is any more or less safe than any other. And then we come to turbulence forecasting. Helping aircraft avoid turbulence is one part of my job so trust me when I say there is NO WAY to forecast turbulence more than an hour or two at most before your flight. Anyone who claims to be able to tell you how turbulent your flight is going to be is trying to either take advantage of you or sell you something. If you remember nothing else from this review, remember that. And finally we come to the “similar accidents” feature. Which is just as useless as any of the other features when determining the safety of a flight. Just because a flight three years ago had an injury due to turbulence does not mean your flight will. Just because a flight yesterday declared an emergency does not mean yours will. Planes and crews rarely fly the same flight two days in a row, let alone for years at a time. So yes, as the developers noted in response to another review, this does “strike a nerve” for those of us in the industry. Because we would much rather you trust the people who do this for a living and have been doing this for years rather than scammers who try to scare you with manipulated data. I have family members scared of flying, and the idea that people like them have access to apps like this that do nothing to help them and everything to hurt them is SICKENING. if you have a serious concern about the safety of your flight, the only people you should be consulting are professionals, not just an app that knows how to find averages.

scam

I feel sorry for people who actually believe this. The scores are totally made up- there’s no way to know pilot proficiency unless you are an actual airline employee, and even then, every pilot is held to the same standard. Also labeling something standard like a hydraulic leak as a “major accident” is borderline criminal. Do better and quit fear mongering. There is literally ZERO way to score a pilot in advance. You don’t have access to that data.