Actually, air travel doesn't really fall prey to the law of large numbers.
Air travel in the US is so safe that it's actually getting difficult to measure it and difficult to identify problem areas. The last fatal airline crash before Asiana 214 was years ago. Some people are most emphatically not dying every year anymore, despite thousands of planes in the air. We go years at a time without a single airline fatality in the US.
And yet, those few accidents that do happen all have identifiable causes with clear remedies. This Asiana crash may have been pilot error, but it was definitely not just random chance. Pilots letting their airplane get too low and too slow on landing with no adverse factors is a clear failure of training and proficiency. One fairly obvious remedy for this one would be to require all airline pilots to hand-fly a purely visual approach at least X times per year to ensure that the skill stays fresh.
I dare you to find a first-world airline crash from the past couple of decades that has no actionable outcomes from the investigation. Shouldn't take you too long to go through all the crashes, since there won't be many to look at in the first place. I guarantee you that every one had actual, useful recommendations come out of the accident investigation, not just bureaucratic CYA "recommendations".
Air travel in the US is so safe that it's actually getting difficult to measure it and difficult to identify problem areas. The last fatal airline crash before Asiana 214 was years ago. Some people are most emphatically not dying every year anymore, despite thousands of planes in the air. We go years at a time without a single airline fatality in the US.
And yet, those few accidents that do happen all have identifiable causes with clear remedies. This Asiana crash may have been pilot error, but it was definitely not just random chance. Pilots letting their airplane get too low and too slow on landing with no adverse factors is a clear failure of training and proficiency. One fairly obvious remedy for this one would be to require all airline pilots to hand-fly a purely visual approach at least X times per year to ensure that the skill stays fresh.
I dare you to find a first-world airline crash from the past couple of decades that has no actionable outcomes from the investigation. Shouldn't take you too long to go through all the crashes, since there won't be many to look at in the first place. I guarantee you that every one had actual, useful recommendations come out of the accident investigation, not just bureaucratic CYA "recommendations".