Effects of Human Factors and Some Selected Weather Variables on Plane Crash

Abstract

Human and weather factors are the biggest problems airline operators deal with because they increase the number of aircraft accident. Consequently, human factors and weather variables were used to determine the impact on aircraft fatalities per plane crash in Nigeria aviation. The information utilized was gathered from the Nigeria civil aviation authority’s accident reports for the period of 53-years between 1969 and 2022. Data were analyzed using Count Data approaches like Poisson, negative binomial, zero inflated Poisson and zero inflated negative binomial models.  The results revealed that the sample mean of the response variable was 0.57 while the sample variance was 1.072, which showed that the variance was greater than the mean number of fatalities per plane disaster. More than 60% of the data involved zero number of fatalities per crash. The pilots in the age group 18-30 years, the pilots having less than 5 years of experience and those who are newly employed were highly associated with the number of fatalities per plane crash. Among other weather factors, lightening, poor visibility, and heavy rainfall were found to be highly associated with plane crash. The findings of the study showed that a single effect of a factor can cause aircraft accident, therefore this study recommends more precautions and development of effective strategies to avoid estimated risk of human and weather factors on the number of plane accidents.