If you want to review current airline safety performance you can ask your favourite AI function to do it for you. Microsoft’s appropriately named Copilot, perhaps?
And if you prefer to see the accident and incident detail item by item, and then crunch the numbers yourself, you can visit the Flight Safety Foundation’s excellent Aviation Safety Network site.
Faced with all this competition, it is easy to see why aviation publications these days are less likely to pay experts like me to write a review for them. For example, for more than the last four decades Flight International/FlightGlobal has commissioned me to review airline safety annually, with briefer reviews at each half-year point. For the last two years the publishers have dropped the January-June reviews, and have decided this year not to commission me to carry out the annual review of 2026.
I am not privy to decisionmaking processes within Flight International/FlightGlobal, so I genuinely don’t know whether they intend, in future, to generate an annual airline safety review internally, or to drop the accustomed review on the grounds that AI-generated reports and expert sites like the Aviation Safety Network are so easy for readers to access free of charge that it’s not worth allocating the resources to produce it.
Beyond those resouces there are subscription services like Cirium aviation analytics. Today’s professional media are constantly having to review what they cover and how they cover it in the light of AI, data suppliers, and social media developments.
Curious to find out what AI might make of my request to generate a summary review of global airline safety for the first six months of 2026 “in the style of David Learmount”, Chat GPT provided this:
“The first six months of 2026 have reinforced a familiar truth about commercial aviation safety: the industry’s underlying safety performance remains exceptionally strong, but public confidence continues to be shaped by a handful of highly visible accidents and serious incidents. While individual events have prompted intense scrutiny, there is no compelling evidence that the global system has suffered a deterioration in safety standards. Rather, they have highlighted the enduring importance of disciplined operational execution, effective oversight, and continuous learning.The industry’s long-term trajectory remains positive, with accident rates still measured in fractions of a million flights and safety improvements driven by better technology, training, and data-led risk management. Yet the first half of the year has also served as a reminder that commercial aviation can never regard safety as an achievement that is complete. Every serious occurrence is an opportunity to identify latent weaknesses before they align, reaffirming that vigilance—not complacency—is the defining characteristic of a mature safety culture.“
While not disagreeing with anything in that summary, I can honestly say that none of the actual sentences would ever be the product of my own pen! Most of those expert journalists I know who have carried out a similar exercise on a subject they know well report that the result is – inevitably – an assembly of terminally bland copy full of generalisations, even if the generalisations are accurate as far as they go.
So, is this the end of the journalistic road for human-generated expert reviews? Time will tell, but I will still go to the motoring journals for a personal review of cars before I consider buying a new one, partly because I want to tap into the writer’s years of experience, but mostly because I want to enjoy the process of becoming informed.
What do you think?
Learmount.com 