Magnetic storms, long-term space flights, and aircraft crashes

The familiar aircraft crashes that occurred during the last 15 years were divided by the authors into two groups: (1) those due to technical failures of the aircraft, and (2) those having resulted from aircraft collisions. Supposedly, the crashes in the second case are caused by humans. Taking into account the well documented correlation between severe traffic accidents (with lethal outcomes) and magnetic storms, it can be conjectured that, provided that the assumption made is correct, the aircraft crashes in the second group will cluster in the time domain of high solar activity in dependence on the Wolff index versus the time W = W ( t ), while the aircraft crashes in the first group will be uniformly distributed over the time scale; i.e., they will also have occurred in the regions of W ( t ) minima. Precisely this hypothesis is confirmed by the data presented by the authors. A 15-year time period was already sufficient to acquire enough statistical material concerning the crashes, and so the large differences in the flying-performance characteristics and technical parameters of the aircraft are of little importance.