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Time-evolving distribution of time lags between commercial airline disasters

M. Ausloos·R. Lambiotte
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Abstract

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.

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M. Ausloos, R. Lambiotte. 2005-09-13. Time-evolving distribution of time lags between commercial airline disasters. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2005.09.058

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