The temporal dynamics of public attention to aviation safety events

Aviation safety events, including incidents, accidents, and fatal crashes, often trigger surges of public attention that can reshape risk perceptions and erode trust in air travel. Understanding how public attention develops and evolves in response to such events is critical for informing crisis communication and public relations in the aviation industry.

Using Google Trends Search Index (GTI) data for "Boeing" and "Airbus" as proxies for public attention and Aviation Herald safety event counts as indicators of safety performance, we examine the temporal dynamics between aviation safety events and collective attention during 2008 - 2025. Given the mixed integration orders across the time series, we employ the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds-testing framework and cross-validate the results using the Toda-Yamamoto causality approach.

The ARDL results reveal a long-run equilibrium between public attention and safety performance for both manufacturers. The reparametrized Error Correction Model (ECM) reveals the short-lived nature of public attention, highlighting the importance of issuing timely, fact-based updates early in the news cycle to curb misinformation. This bursty pattern is further supported by the Toda-Yamamoto causality tests and visually demonstrated through the orthogonalized impulse-response functions (OIRFs). Finally, the asymmetric finding that only Boeing-related crashes exhibit a significant contemporaneous association with public attention may reflect heightened reputational salience surrounding the iconic manufacturer during the study period.