Time-evolving distribution of time lags between commercial airline disasters
Abstract
Description
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.
24 refs, 22 pages, 9 figures to be published in physica a
24 refs, 22 pages, 9 figures to be published in physica a