Pointing and calling Flight Safety Australia In 2014, the International Air Transportation Association estimated that inadvertent slide deployment costs the airline industry more than $20 million each year. What can aviation learn from the bullet train driver. With the horrible exception of the Amagasaki crash of 2005, which killed 107 people, Japanese railways are notably safe, with one passenger death per 51.4 billion passenger kilometres. The high-speed Shinkansen network, which is now six lines with trains running at up to 320 km/h (170 kt), has carried more than 10 billion passengers without a single passenger death from derailment or collision. In 1994, the Japanese Railway Technical Research Institute assessed pointing and calling in an experiment that asked volunteers to complete a simple, but variable, task. When no special steps were taken to prevent errors, the volunteers made 2.38 errors per 100 actions. Calling or pointing cut this error rate significantly. But the greatest reduction in error to 0.38 errors per 100 actions happened when the volunteers both pointed and called their actions. This combination reduced mistakes by almost 85 per cent.
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