According to a government official involved in overseeing airplane safety during the last year, over 75 percent of the voice-recorder tapes taken from small airplanes involved in relatively minor accidents record the whistling of the pilot during the fifteen minutes immediately preceding the accident. Even such minor accidents pose some safety risk. Ttherefore, if passengers hear the pilot start to whistle they should take safety precautions, whether instructed by the pilot to do so or not. The argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it ["ignores the fact that in nearly one-quarter of these accidents following the recommendation would not have improved passengers' safety", 'fails to specify the percentage of all small airplane flights that involve relatively minor accidents', 'provides no information about the percentage of all small airplane flights during which the pilot whistles at some time during that flight', 'accepts the reliability of the cited statistics on the authority of an unidentified government of official']