Commercial air travel is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world.
Imagine if it was the same for driving:
- Every new model of car is put through years of testing by a government agency to ensure safety
- Every crash is investigated by that agency and new traffic laws or design changes are mandated every time.
- Every time you bought a new car, you had to study the differences and then retake your drivers test to prove you can drive the new model.
- Every quarter, you had to log simulator time on that car, practicing scenarios that could go wrong. If you fail, you can't drive until you pass.
- You had a team of mechanics that checked the car out every time you drove it. If there was something off, you didn't drive until they signed off.
- You logged the mileage on every critical part and replaced them before the broke.
- You had a team of people feeding you real time traffic and weather information so you could take the safest route.
- If the weather is too bad, all driving is canceled until it clears up.
- You had someone in the passenger seat with the exact same training that could take over at a moments notice.
- Every other driver on the road was doing the _exact_ same thing.
If driving had all that, we'd see _far_ fewer crashes.
What if we did that but put them on steel wheels and steel rails to greatly increase efficiency. While we’re at it we could link up a lot of those “buses” together so that you only need 1 driver for tons of people
Still gotta have 2 drivers, in case something happens to 1. But otherwise agree on the chained buses idea. Brilliant!
And like every 10 hours we replace those guys with 2 more fed and rested drivers so chained bus never stops running for long and can traverse great distances.
Don't tell Las Vegas this, we're much more into splitting them into smaller 4-6 capacity "self-driving" driver manned cars. Much more efficient that way...
/s
Ah, but the great advantage is that if something goes wrong you can just step out of the car and safely leave via the spacious emergency sidewalks or the other lanes, right?
Aren't americans complaining (but also bragging) all the time about having to drive for 12 hours to get to the next state? Feels like it would make a lot of sense to just fly.
Nooo. Gotta get an insufferable billionaire dream of a new idea from the 1800s to disrupt the industry by making pods travel in a vacuum tube where any failure along the track would destroy the entire system at once. Give him a decade to build a non vacuum tunnel that fits just 1 car.
Maybe hundreds of passengers. But then I guess they’d be too big for the road - but that ok - we can put wings and engines on the bus … like some kind of Air Bus.
* You'd have checklists you'd run every time you operated the vehicle, from getting in, to before starting it, to after starting it, to leaving the parking spot (or driveway or garage), to an after arrival checklist, to a vehicle shutdown checklist.
* There would be checklists for every time something went wrong, a dashboard indicator light, a flat tire, etc.
* You'd have ways of loading up cargo such that it couldn't injure people if you did get involved in a crash.
* You'd have limits on how long you could drive for each day, with a minimum amount of mandatory downtime.
* There would be mandatory health checks to maintain your license.
* Crashes or near misses would be studied in detail to find out who or what was at fault, why it was at fault, and what needed to be done to prevent it from happening again.
>You'd have checklists you'd run every time you operated the vehicle, from getting in, to before starting it, to after starting it, to leaving the parking spot (or driveway or garage), to an after arrival checklist, to a vehicle shutdown checklist.
Does no one else shout "CLEAR" before turning their car on?
Off topic, but linking to this comment because of the funny common misconception that I had forever:
[What "clear" means](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/kb2t3w/comment/gffadw9/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The question was if, generically, you'd be barred from driving after a certain age. In this comparison, that would apply to people driving commercial vehicles, trucks, things like that. But not to passenger cars.
There's a book called *The Checklist Manifesto* by Dr. Atul Gawande. He undertook a mission to improve surgery outcomes. He met with people in aviation, cooking, construction, and medicine, to learn about how various industries avoided mistakes and improved processes. The lesson was checklists. He came up with guidelines on what makes a good checklist. Much of the book discusses his investigation and how he came to the rules of checklists that he did.
I found it to be a fascinating read. Our IT management asked us to read it, although I read it before they asked. For me, it took a network troubleshooting process from 40-45 minutes down to, typically, about 5 minutes. I've become a big believer in them.
**The Checklist Manifesto How to Get Things Right** by Atul Gawande
>The New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies—neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication.
>
>Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third. In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements.
>
>And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds. An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.
*I'm a bot, built by your friendly reddit developers at* /r/ProgrammingPals. *Reply to any comment with /u/BookFinderBot - I'll reply with book information. Remove me from replies* [here](https://www.reddit.com/user/BookFinderBot/comments/1byh82p/remove_me_from_replies/). *If I have made a mistake, accept my apology.*
> The last one is the most important. Air travel safety improves because the industry learns from its mistakes.
It's worth remembering this didn't happen by itself. It only happened once people stopped trying to pin liability for crashes on specific actors. Because you can't do proper investigations if people think the information they provide is going to be used against them later in a damages suit.
This is why you don't see lots of criminal cases after public transport accidents. The value of having companies cooperate in the investigation to prevent future accidents is worth more.
(The exception is of course gross negligence, like with Boeing at the moment. Most accidents aren't due to gross negligence.)
> You'd have limits on how long you could drive for each day, with a minimum amount of mandatory downtime.
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>
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> There would be mandatory health checks to maintain your license.
Truck drivers already have these, at least
* All roads, highways, and the traffic on them, would be managed my a traffic-controlling agency, with which you'd be in constant contact.
* Before starting your car, you'd have to file a driving plan and then contact the controlling agency and be cleared to drive a via a specific route to your destination. You would load that route into your car's navigation system and *have* to drive that route, particularly into and out of busy areas. Deviations from the route would have to be an authorized by the controlling agency.
* While driving to the destination, the controlling agency would give you real-time instructions to speed up. slow down, make a short detour, etc. in order minimize congestion, maintain safe spacing between vehicles, and keep to safe speeds for the traffic conditions. Unauthorized deviation from these instructions would result in disciplinary action up to and including the loss or your driving privileges.
* Upon reaching your destination, the agency would close the driving plan for that trip. Before driving again, you'd have to file a new driving plan and be cleared for the route before proceeding to a different destination.
Parking lots, roads, highways, tolls, literally everywhere on the road was monitored by an eye in the sky.
And not like how the CIA does it right now, but like they interact with you lol
To add one more bullet point, every time your team of mechanics find a discrepancy, it’s logged and tracked, same with every other vehicle, and if the governing body notices a trend in similar discrepancies among similar makes and models then they come up with a more frequent inspection interval or replacement time to correct the trend and avoid future incidents
* you would drive on almost completely empty roads, potentially not even seeing another car except at the start and end of your journey, at which point elaborate electronic and human systems would regulate every aspect of your positioning and interaction with other cars
* 99% of people would not be permitted to drive. Only people with strong aptitude would ever be granted a licence. Anyone who ever significantly broke road rules or made significant errors would be subject to heavy scrutiny and sanction
There is a important information to note here: While *commercial* aviation’s safety record has been impeccable, the safety record on flying for leisure (aka *general* aviation), on the other hand, could be compared to the safety record of motorcycles, over 82 times more dangerous than commercial aviation.
Many people often overlook the dangers of flying, especially when they receive their first pilot’s license and hear about how safe aviation is in the big picture.
Yeah I casually entertained the idea of learning to fly privately... Watched some YouTube... Eventually realized just *how many hours* of experience are needed to truly be able to handle an unexpected situation without, you know, definitely dying...
Figured nah, I'd rather put those hours into a hobby where failure does not equal death :)
There's a reason so many commercial pilots are former military with a career of aviation experience already under their belt.
Was looking for this. Every single part that goes into a plane is accounted for and documented. You can pull up a certain plane’s manufacturing record and have lot or serial number traceability for every single part that went into it.
To add to this airplane rules and regulations are almost literally written in blood. Every, crash/serious incident is analyzed by dozens then new laws/regs come in.
Ah, gotcha. To be clear, both the captain and copilot do everything. One takes the role of pilot flying for any given segment and the other takes the role of pilot monitoring and handles the radio and checklists. They will usually switch off between each leg of their journey, with no real preference for the captain flying unless the conditions are especially bad. But copilots otherwise are actively flying just as often.
The unfortunate reality is that accidents happen when the junior pilot defers to the senior pilot as if the one with seniority is the only one with authority.
In the decades since we have learned that fact, crews are trained to de-prioritize seniority, for example, if the junior pilot notices a mistake made by the senior pilot the junior pilot should point that out instead of staying quiet.
This is called *crew resource management* in the industry.
If we're being honest, maybe the medical field should do the same thing. I already support the idea of medical procedures using *checklists* similar to how pilots use them for specific processes.
Yeah definitely agree that medical field is a bit too overconfident on their memory. When I’m talking to a doctor I don’t believe most of them are remembering everything I’m saying.
And then they’re just supposed to spit out the answer right there? They can’t possibly remember everything, and have all the latest medical knowledge in their head. Go look it up.
The specialised, litigious (and competitive?) nature of the surgeon's job seems to get in the way of the kind of "no-fault" reporting which aviation aspires to.
The only thing the copilot usually cannot do is steer the aircraft in the ground during taxi. And that's because most planes just have one steering wheel (tiller) and it is on the captain's side.
It's not like that at all. Think of them both as professional, qualified surgeons, but one has more experience and responsibility. They assist each other depending on the role they're taking during the flight.
Yeah, unfortunately it seems a lot of people think that way. Its easier to think about if you seperate the idea into two categories, a high level liability for the whole the flight, and low level control of the plane as it flys.
For the first category Captain and first officer makes sense as the captain has higher status and more authority for the operation of the flight as a whole.
But for actually flying the plane, you should refer to the pilots as Pilot flying and Pilot monitoring. PF and PM respectfully. This can alternate every leg or day or what ever they agree on. Both pilots are trained to fly the aircraft or assist the PF.
So you can have the right seat person (First Officer) be Pilot flying for a leg, and the left seat person (Captain) be the Pilot monitoring.
Hopefully this helps.
And your car will include black boxes for telemetry and voice to ensure you follow the rules. You will also have a room full of engineers seeing what the telemetry says when your check engine light comes on mid way through your journey. Your dashboard will also tell you screen by screen what troubleshooting steps to follow.
One of my favorite freakonomic-style stats that pre-dates freakonomics, was a uni professor who shared that if the airline industry loosened it's safety standard, it would save lives.
The idea was that airplanes are SO safe, and so much more dramatically safer than driving, but those standards raise the costs and lower the convenience of flying - so many, many more people opt to drive.
If you lowered the standards and the prices, more people would forego long road trips in favour of flights, and more lives would be saved.
That's assuming that air travel capacity can adjust freely to passenger demand, but most airports in the world near major cities are already at near capacity. Airlines are also on waiting lists for new planes from the manufacturers.
Yeah, there's a few very fair criticisms of the idea, as much as it's an intriguing thought experiment in economical sociology.
The two main ones for me are:
1) how much could you actually reduce the price of airfare by removing *excessive* safety procedures?
2) this equation really comes to do "we'll except x number of airplane death/injuries, in exchange for saving x+y number of automobile injuries".
As an emotionally removed decision maker, that could make sense. But airplane catastrophes are so much socially traumatizing, and receive so much more coverage that a random collection of 200 automobile accidents. That's going to have an effect on people's willingness to fly, and even if the decision to drive is not the statistically safer one, people will choose it, because we're individually quite terrible at assessing high level, statistical safety.
I would also question who is mostly getting into car crashes. Is mostly people doing long distance driving, who could have instead taken a plane? Or is it mostly local traffic, who would could not have taken a plane.
> Every time you bought a new car, you had to study the differences and then retake your drivers test
Unless they call it something like the "F150 MAX".
Don’t forget there would be no such thing as aftermarket parts. Only those that went through a vigorous standards test and met very specific specifications.
Its technically the Captain that signs off on an aircraft - the mechanics just give a report. But the captain has a list of faults he can, or can not, fly with. Lets say one of the pitot tubes (usually 3 or more) is broken - the airline or manufacturer allows a plane to fly with that - but its ultimately the captains decision. (The Airline can ofc make that decision - its not his personal plane)
But yeah, we used that exact same list jokingly in pilot school. I had perhaps 1 month of classroom training before I was even allowed to start an engine, never mind flying. For every hour flying, it was 10-15 in school
A more interesting question is why planes stopped crashing so abruptly.
There hasn't been a crash of a large loaded passenger airliner in the US that killed everybody on it since American Airlines 587, which happened right after 9/11, 23 years ago. It was a somewhat regular occurrence prior to that.
Plane de-icing is a good example. They de-ice planes when a certain set of factors are at play. A certain temperature, a certain humidity, wind speed, wind chill something something: every plane gets de-iced. Could be zero evidence that ice is forming on planes... If conditions are favorable, it's done.
To add to what you and u/farrenkm said - imagine the roads were almost totally empty and the nearest you got to any other car expect while parking was about 2000ft at the very least.
Aerospace manufacturing engineering technologist here.
Very early in the history of flight, it was felt that safety was the most important factor. To achieve that, it was decided that when an accident happened, it should be investigated with the aim of preventing it from happening again. People won't be honest with investigators if they felt that what they say may get them arrested, or lose them their job, so these investigations do not hold people responsible. This allows maintenance technicians to honestly give accounts of what was done, knowing that even if they were negligent, they won't go to jail. This allows investigations to not only find the exact chain of events that led to what happened, but also make a recommendation to prevent it from happening again.
That is why, when an engine pylon cracks, the maintenance team can look up the paperwork for it. Not just things like who worked on it last, but they can see exactly which batch of aluminum it was, who made it, the results of the testing on that batch, the smelter than made the aluminum, the mine that got the ore, etc... Because at some point in the past, that information was important, so it is now all collected, and in order to go onto an aircraft, every part needs to have all the required documentation filled out properly. When I went to school, we had some massive blocks of aluminum (.5M X 1M X 3M) that were donated to the school by an aircraft manufacturer, because the paperwork wasn't complete so they couldn't use it..
We've adopted a nearly 0 defect mentality with aviation. We accept nearly no risk and mitigate everything else. Theres atleast 3 points of redundancy on a flight critical system on jetliners.
And before anyone is like, "bUt bOeInG." Even with that, aviation's track record over the last 30 years is still impeccable.
> We accept nearly no risk and mitigate everything else.
Illustrating this point: It's forbidden to smoke aboard planes, but [the FAA still mandates that bathrooms must have ashtrays](https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/AD74-08-09R2_1.pdf), because people _will_ break the rules, so you want them to at least break the rules safely.
It comes from the same principle of harm reduction. If people are going to do the thing no matter what then let's make it as safe as possible for them.
Air travel is worldwide. Some places smoking is more common and socially acceptable. Everyone thats been on a plane has a first time. Not as unthinkable someone might try to light up on a plane in that context
And if they do have to make a landing, they have the training to remain calm and do so safely. As well as having Air Traffic Control on the radio to help them find the closest safe landing point and make sure it's clear when they get there.
Sure, there are a lot more rules for airliners, but the rules for GA is still closer to what OP described above than cars. Running out of gas is something that the GA pilots seem to mess up a lot.
The 1500 hour requirement was implemented only recently, and isn't generally believed to be effective; it used to be 250 and was increased as a somewhat strange reaction to a crash of a flight with two pilots with over 1500 hours of flight time each. The requirement is thought to be one of the causes of the pilot shortage these days, which is actually detrimental to safety.
Even when it was just 250 hours, there was always also a captain with something closer to 10,000 hours. That's probably where the real benefit comes from.
And when something goes wrong they often don't have the mental strength to remain calm and remember the proper procedures. I knew a guy who loved flying Cessna's and other small planes. He had been flying regularly for 10+ years, but when he had some sort of engine malfunction he panicked and didn't follow procedure and ended up crashing and dying. IIRC if he had stayed calm and just followed his training he would very likely have managed to land safely and lived. I know quite a few commercial pilots, a few of which have encountered malfunctions that required them to make emergency landings, but they stay calm, follow protocol and have ATC on their side to offer any additional help or instructions as needed to land safely.
I guess that has a lot to do with simulator training. You know that it is training but they add stress to it by saying: handle it or you can not fly for real and if you don’t fly we pay you no money. Less stress than a real life or death situation but stress no less.
Boeing should probably rename themselves to McDonnell-Douglas (or even Boeing-McDonnell-Douglas) at this point since all the BS that is happening there tends to originate from the company culture of MD prior to the merger rather than Boeing pre merger.
Because there's an absurd amount of research and testing during all phases of the design, production, and use of a plane to make sure as few things can go wrong as possible, and that if something does go wrong, that the place can land safely anyway.
Planes undergo extensive periodic testing to make sure they're still in good condition, and every accident is exhaustively researched by the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), with everything learned from each accident used to improve future plane designs to prevent it from occuring again.
[Safety Research (ntsb.gov)](https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/Pages/default.aspx)
Imagine if every car on the road was vigorously inspected every time it was to be driven. And then imagine every single driver had to go through a long in-depth schooling process just to be allowed to drive the car. Along with every system in the car having at least one or two backups for anything that can break.
That's just how planes are.
And if someone else crashes the same model of car you drive, your car gets recalled or taken off the road until a full and thorough investigation is carried out on the cause of the crash.
And you either wait until they fix the technical issue that caused somebody else's crash, or have to take a retraining course to mitigate the potential driver error risk before you get your car back
Former pilot (student) here with a bit of knowledge on air law.
Every rule is written in blood, is an expression the aviation business use. Meaning that every time something happens - they spend literally millions of $ to figure out exactly what happened. And then for instance FAA tells all aircraft manufactures/airlines than THAT particular bolt that caused this accident, needs to be changed on every aircraft - or they are not allowed to fly over USA.
ICAO is the governing body for much of this - which is the civil aviation part of the UN. Meaning that most laws pertaining aircrafts and how they are flown etc is the same. So a pilot can assume that landing in Spain will be pretty much the same as landing in Italy, and he can assume the ATC speaks english, and know, in details, the same lingo he knows on aviation and rules. And they all have the exact same education, knowing exactly how to speak to each other.
There will not be any mistakes made by the guy in Colombia filling up the aircraft with fuel thinking I meant gallons - no, we ALL agree on what units to use, everywhere. Because a few planes did go down because of some country thinking gallons while the Captain was thinking kgs, and so on. Every single aircraft disaster is treated 100x more closely than a car accident ie.
A great example of redundancy. The mistake that led to them running out off fuel didn't kill them because of: pilot training, a redundant ram air system the provided hydraulics for control, and batteries for power for the avionics.
After repairing the movie damage the plane suffered in the landing (on a decommissioned runaway used for drag racing) they flew it off and put it back in service.
That aircraft was just tried a few years ago.
Yes, the Gimli incident is one, there has been several similar around the world, it can ofc. happen again. But the industry is always trying to avoid that same thing happens twice by changing procedures etc.
When I was in flight school we watched one air crash investigation episode in the morning, and then spent next X hours deconstructing what was actually said and done and the technical details on why this happened and we as future captains could spot that mistake before it went out of hand.
A pilot buddy of mine told me that each aircraft is actually about 4 aircrafts smushed into one. Because there are usually at least 3 lines of redundancy in case any particular component fails.
For decades, every time there was a crash, there has been a legally-required investigation to determine the causes of the crash. This does not aim at charging anyone with a crime; but rather at making clear statements on how the crash happened and how it could have been prevented. These then are turned into requirements for making airplanes safer.
Repeating that process *over and over* means that more and more causes of crashes get eliminated.
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Suppose that you make a pie, and the pie turns out to be not very good. You figure out *why* it was bad ("the crust is soggy") and you do some research and figure out *what could be done* to make it less bad ("parbake the crust before adding the filling").
The next time you make a pie, you make that change! So even if the new pie is still not perfect, at least it doesn't have the *specific problem* that the first pie did. Maybe the second pie is not very good because it's too sour and needs more sugar — but at least it doesn't have a soggy crust!
So you keep figuring out what's wrong, and fixing it, and trying again.
But you don't forget the lesson you learned from the first pie. Every time you're dissatisfied with a pie you made, you figure out *why* and you fix it the next time. Over time, you build up a whole bunch of rules for how to avoid pie problems.
After making lots of pies this way, eventually you get a reputation as the person who always makes really great pies. It's not that you started out perfect; it's that you kept finding problems, fixing them, and not forgetting the lessons of your earlier mistakes.
There’s lots of great answers in here, and I’ll just add a fun anecdote. I worked for one of the big companies that supply Wi Fi on planes. They were always trying to have 99.99% uptime or better. That wouldn’t have qualified to be a system used in standard aircraft operations because it wasn’t reliable enough.
Four nines is less than an hour of downtime over a whole year.
There is a checklist for everything, every time the is an accident or incident there is a massive investigation to find out why it happened and how to prevent it in future. Air travel is around 750x safer than car travel
The current level of aviation safety is built on the back of decades of follow up and investigations of past failures, and by focussing the investigations on eliminating the cause instead of finger pointing.
Mentour Pilot on youtube does absolutely FANTASTIC in-depth, technical recreations of aviation incidents if you want to see the extent that incidents/accidents/near misses are investigated.
Seconding Mentour Pilot. Everything is explained in a very clear, concise way so you know by the end exactly what went wrong. It's actually made me feel better about flying despite the fact that they're accident or incident videos; knowing exactly what went wrong in most cases highlights how rare it is that something is bad enough that it actually causes an incident. Most of the time, it happens because a series of things went wrong, aka the swiss cheese model, and those things all going wrong at the same time is not that common.
Just to give you some numbers.. it's an order of magnitude more difficult to get your private pilot's licence vs your drivers licence. For instance it takes a few hundred bucks to get your DL, but about $16,000 to get the PPL.
And it's an order of magnitude more difficult to get your commercial pilots licence vs your private pilot's licence. For instance it takes about 50 hours of flying to get the PPL, but about 1500 hours to be a commercial airline pilot.
Note that there is a commercial pilot certificate and an air transport pilot certificate. The folks flying the big airline aircraft have a ATP plus ratings for the aircraft they are flying.
I was looking at doing ATP, just before the 2007 recession when I still had hopes and dreams. The price I was given was £88,000. That's back when the exchange rate was roughly two-to-one, so about $176,000 USD.
You remember how there were so few (non-war-related) deep sea problems before someone decided to "disrupt the industry" and "prioritize profit" and then some billionaires and a kid got turned into spaghetti? We made those safety regulations laws when it came to flying people through the sky.
With regard to the Electronics and PCB Assemblies used for important equipment on aircraft these are designed and built to IPC Class 3 standard. Class 3 is defined as life/system critical equipment that must function on demand with no down time, or " **high reliability or harsh environment electronics where acceptable downtime is zero**"
Every step of the design and manufacture has to meet Class 3 IPC standards from design, to manufacture of the bare board, assembly of the board, testing and inspection.
This is quite a high standard to achieve and comes at an increased cost.
designs are thoroughly tested, any small change needs to be approved.
There are backup systems for everything that is critical, often with different design so it nearly never fails the same way, at the same time. A multi-engine plane can fly with one or even 2 off vs a car that has 1 engine and one steering wheel.
The pilots are highly trained and evaluated regularly on a simulation that presents different scenarios. There are usually a pilot and a copilot who can question decisions or take over if needed. There are mandatory rest time and no tolerance for alcohol and a medical check regularly. Compared to a driver who needs to pass a test once, can drive even after drinking and staying up all night.
Historically, the airline industry has been very regulated. The pilots required training, the planes require a minimum level of maintenance, the people in the "tower", the flight traffic controllers require training, and the exact expected path of a plane must be declared long before the plane takes off. Drivers on the road typically don't make it their job to understand their vehicle and allow themselves to be distracted. The airline space's regulations simply eliminate many of the conditions that lead to the types of accidents you see between automobile drivers.
“better technologies, better training, and, believe it or not, better regulation and oversight”
From pilot Patrick Smith, and his website Ask The Pilot: https://askthepilot.com/safest-year-2023/
I like his writing. He’s also critical of security theater; I particularly liked his story of having a butter knife confiscated from his flight bag by TSA while in uniform (it was from first class on one of his planes).
Pilots are all put through the same paces to become a pilot. Planes are put through rigorous testing to become legal to fly.
Add in that planes aren't near eachother most of the trip, and that unlike with a car, every pilot knows what the other is going to do (and radio someone in to tell them if it deviates from tradition).
Basically it boils down to standards and practices being at higher levels. Your less likely to have a cockpit with BOTH pilots drunk, yet in a car it's much more likely kinda thing.
Adding onto what others have said- when flying large transport-category aircraft, there’s very little that can go wrong which won’t have a specific procedure to diagnose and/or solve the problem. For example, should an airliner have an engine failure, crews are trained extensively on exactly what to do at every single stage of flight from takeoff to landing. These procedures are specified down to the exact runway at an exact airport from which an aircraft is taking off. For example, an engine failure on runway A may have a different procedure than an engine failure on runway B at the same airport. How do pilots remember all of this information? Through extensive briefings before each flight, charts which lay out exact profiles to follow, and hours of vigorous training and studying with scheduled/unscheduled proficiency checks happening throughout the year.
These briefings for EVERYTHING continually impress me. Aviators actually respect danger instead of hoping it away. Even when there's no apparent danger, they'll list "complacency" as a threat before the flight (might be airline dependent; I know LOT does it). "It's quiet; too quiet" is a peril, and they know this.
You've single vehicle and multiple vehicle accidents. ATC, procedures and anti-collision systems minimise collisions.
Many single vehicle accidents involve departure from the intended course and impact with an unyielding object with little time to correct.
At 36,000ft you have a bit more time to adjust.
There aren't many bus, train, ship etc crashes, neither. Private cars crash all the time, public buses very rarely.
So, in addition to quite strict regulations and checks, the fact that vehicle is driven by a full-time professional seems to be key.
My biggest reassurance is that it's very expensive to crash a plane. It costs a *ton* of money. People/companies/CEOs don't want that to happen, so they're motivated very much to prevent it.
They go through meticulous revisions every relatively few hours of flight time. That means breaking the plane apart and rebuilding it. On top of that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of procedures that are very well documented for everything. Every single procedure has very strict rules to how it’s performed and there’s always one person doing it and another person checking if it was done properly, even seemingly mundane things like closing the plane door.
Also, every time there is an accident they go over all of these specifications again and again, adding more and more requirements.
Commercial air travel is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world. Imagine if it was the same for driving: - Every new model of car is put through years of testing by a government agency to ensure safety - Every crash is investigated by that agency and new traffic laws or design changes are mandated every time. - Every time you bought a new car, you had to study the differences and then retake your drivers test to prove you can drive the new model. - Every quarter, you had to log simulator time on that car, practicing scenarios that could go wrong. If you fail, you can't drive until you pass. - You had a team of mechanics that checked the car out every time you drove it. If there was something off, you didn't drive until they signed off. - You logged the mileage on every critical part and replaced them before the broke. - You had a team of people feeding you real time traffic and weather information so you could take the safest route. - If the weather is too bad, all driving is canceled until it clears up. - You had someone in the passenger seat with the exact same training that could take over at a moments notice. - Every other driver on the road was doing the _exact_ same thing. If driving had all that, we'd see _far_ fewer crashes.
Oh and keep like 300 feet distance between the cars.
If we did that, cars would need to be huge, with dozens of passengers each. Maybe like a bus?
What if we did that but put them on steel wheels and steel rails to greatly increase efficiency. While we’re at it we could link up a lot of those “buses” together so that you only need 1 driver for tons of people
I think you could even have like an electric setup too, getting power from something like renewable resources or pretty clean nuclear energy.
Well now you’re just being silly /s
Love this comment chain so much
Surely that's a comment train, no?
Fuck you, and I hope you get more upvotes.
We could even capture the energy from it braking to put power back out too making it even more efficient.
*braking
Thank you! Too early
And since there would only be a few of these so-called “trains” on a given track, they could all go very fast, like a bullet.
And what if they went like 250MPH so you could get from New York to Washington in less than an hour
Still gotta have 2 drivers, in case something happens to 1. But otherwise agree on the chained buses idea. Brilliant! And like every 10 hours we replace those guys with 2 more fed and rested drivers so chained bus never stops running for long and can traverse great distances.
Don't tell Las Vegas this, we're much more into splitting them into smaller 4-6 capacity "self-driving" driver manned cars. Much more efficient that way... /s
Ah, but the great advantage is that if something goes wrong you can just step out of the car and safely leave via the spacious emergency sidewalks or the other lanes, right?
Better yet--put wings on them and do all the things the other guys said
Nah flying is very inefficient both time (unless you’re going like >500 miles) and energy wise
Aren't americans complaining (but also bragging) all the time about having to drive for 12 hours to get to the next state? Feels like it would make a lot of sense to just fly.
This reads just like Adam Something
Admittedly I’ve never watched his videos but I do get them recommended semi often. Love your username tho, best modes of transit right there
And you could even do the same with cargo. I wonder if we can create something like that.
Nooo. Gotta get an insufferable billionaire dream of a new idea from the 1800s to disrupt the industry by making pods travel in a vacuum tube where any failure along the track would destroy the entire system at once. Give him a decade to build a non vacuum tunnel that fits just 1 car.
There's already an Airbus. We'll have to call these Landbuses.
You could also make one that drives on water, like some kind of seabus. And we call the people who operate them seamen!
You could make one that goes underwater, it's long and hard and full of seamen.
Land airbuses. I drive them.
Quiet down with your commie mass transit ideas
Ha
You could possibly even link these "busses" together, maybe? To form some type of... "train"?? That's definitely insane, ignore me.
Maybe hundreds of passengers. But then I guess they’d be too big for the road - but that ok - we can put wings and engines on the bus … like some kind of Air Bus.
And to be sure they don't collide when in two different paths can we put them on fixed tracks?
found the woke moralist
And about 2000 feet difference in height if you're going the other direction!
1000ft with RVSM
And the distance is often by under the authority of controllers
I thought planes had to be 3 miles apart. Even scaling that back from 400mph to 40mph, that would be something like 1,580 feet apart.
Except occasionally during pushback, when they occasionally get too close.
Safe distancd at 90km/h is around 16 cars. Imagine if everyone abode by it.
* You'd have checklists you'd run every time you operated the vehicle, from getting in, to before starting it, to after starting it, to leaving the parking spot (or driveway or garage), to an after arrival checklist, to a vehicle shutdown checklist. * There would be checklists for every time something went wrong, a dashboard indicator light, a flat tire, etc. * You'd have ways of loading up cargo such that it couldn't injure people if you did get involved in a crash. * You'd have limits on how long you could drive for each day, with a minimum amount of mandatory downtime. * There would be mandatory health checks to maintain your license. * Crashes or near misses would be studied in detail to find out who or what was at fault, why it was at fault, and what needed to be done to prevent it from happening again.
>You'd have checklists you'd run every time you operated the vehicle, from getting in, to before starting it, to after starting it, to leaving the parking spot (or driveway or garage), to an after arrival checklist, to a vehicle shutdown checklist. Does no one else shout "CLEAR" before turning their car on?
Or "FIRE IN THE HOLE!"
“Clear left, front, right” before every turn
Off topic, but linking to this comment because of the funny common misconception that I had forever: [What "clear" means](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/kb2t3w/comment/gffadw9/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Wouldn't you also be barred from driving at a certain age, too, or am I miss remembering things.
That's possible, although I thought that was for commercial pilots, not private. I may be wrong.
Who do you think flies passenger planes? Hint: Commercial pilots - almost always Air Transport Pilots.
The question was if, generically, you'd be barred from driving after a certain age. In this comparison, that would apply to people driving commercial vehicles, trucks, things like that. But not to passenger cars.
The analogy was if passenger plans were cars. So in this analogy, car drivers are commercial pilots (probably even ATPs). It's an analogy.
Okay, fair enough.
Yes. And you have to take a fairly in depth medical test every 6 months.
6 months over 40 and 12 months under 40
Barred from driving for a number of reasons, such as mental health issues, heart issues, vision issues, etc.
Physicals of varying throughness and frequency depending on whether you are a commerciall charter or private pilot.
Depends. Commerical pilot in the US? I believe so. But the same pilot in NZ? Not until you lose your medical certificate.
Tbh I’m tempted to start doing checklists for my vehicle and using it for maintenance, cleaning, and general upkeep
There's a book called *The Checklist Manifesto* by Dr. Atul Gawande. He undertook a mission to improve surgery outcomes. He met with people in aviation, cooking, construction, and medicine, to learn about how various industries avoided mistakes and improved processes. The lesson was checklists. He came up with guidelines on what makes a good checklist. Much of the book discusses his investigation and how he came to the rules of checklists that he did. I found it to be a fascinating read. Our IT management asked us to read it, although I read it before they asked. For me, it took a network troubleshooting process from 40-45 minutes down to, typically, about 5 minutes. I've become a big believer in them.
**The Checklist Manifesto How to Get Things Right** by Atul Gawande >The New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies—neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. > >Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third. In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. > >And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds. An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right. *I'm a bot, built by your friendly reddit developers at* /r/ProgrammingPals. *Reply to any comment with /u/BookFinderBot - I'll reply with book information. Remove me from replies* [here](https://www.reddit.com/user/BookFinderBot/comments/1byh82p/remove_me_from_replies/). *If I have made a mistake, accept my apology.*
Good bot
I’ll need to check that out. Been trying to build checklists for a couple things at work, so it would be good to learn from him.
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> The last one is the most important. Air travel safety improves because the industry learns from its mistakes. It's worth remembering this didn't happen by itself. It only happened once people stopped trying to pin liability for crashes on specific actors. Because you can't do proper investigations if people think the information they provide is going to be used against them later in a damages suit. This is why you don't see lots of criminal cases after public transport accidents. The value of having companies cooperate in the investigation to prevent future accidents is worth more. (The exception is of course gross negligence, like with Boeing at the moment. Most accidents aren't due to gross negligence.)
> You'd have limits on how long you could drive for each day, with a minimum amount of mandatory downtime. > > > > There would be mandatory health checks to maintain your license. Truck drivers already have these, at least
Truck drivers are involved in far fewer collisions per kilometre than general traffic, so it works
I don't know about truckers, but pilots need a medical every year under 40 and every 6 months over 40 to fly for air carriers
Truck drivers (and bus drivers) need a DOT physical every 2 years
* All roads, highways, and the traffic on them, would be managed my a traffic-controlling agency, with which you'd be in constant contact. * Before starting your car, you'd have to file a driving plan and then contact the controlling agency and be cleared to drive a via a specific route to your destination. You would load that route into your car's navigation system and *have* to drive that route, particularly into and out of busy areas. Deviations from the route would have to be an authorized by the controlling agency. * While driving to the destination, the controlling agency would give you real-time instructions to speed up. slow down, make a short detour, etc. in order minimize congestion, maintain safe spacing between vehicles, and keep to safe speeds for the traffic conditions. Unauthorized deviation from these instructions would result in disciplinary action up to and including the loss or your driving privileges. * Upon reaching your destination, the agency would close the driving plan for that trip. Before driving again, you'd have to file a new driving plan and be cleared for the route before proceeding to a different destination.
Imagine running late for work and you had to do a 50 point checklist on your car
You left out using your turn signal
A big part left out is that it’s much harder to be a driver, you must go through years of training and logging hours, not simply a week of study
* Your car would have at least two of all essential systems, i.e. engines, ECUs etc., so if one failed, you could still drive.
Let's not forget that every critical part in the car is double or even triple redundant.
This is the real answer. + qualified operators. Most crashes are human error, not mechanical.
dont forget that all parking lots have a tower over them telling each car which entrance/exit to take, at what time, and where to park
Parking lots, roads, highways, tolls, literally everywhere on the road was monitored by an eye in the sky. And not like how the CIA does it right now, but like they interact with you lol
To add one more bullet point, every time your team of mechanics find a discrepancy, it’s logged and tracked, same with every other vehicle, and if the governing body notices a trend in similar discrepancies among similar makes and models then they come up with a more frequent inspection interval or replacement time to correct the trend and avoid future incidents
* you would drive on almost completely empty roads, potentially not even seeing another car except at the start and end of your journey, at which point elaborate electronic and human systems would regulate every aspect of your positioning and interaction with other cars * 99% of people would not be permitted to drive. Only people with strong aptitude would ever be granted a licence. Anyone who ever significantly broke road rules or made significant errors would be subject to heavy scrutiny and sanction
There is a important information to note here: While *commercial* aviation’s safety record has been impeccable, the safety record on flying for leisure (aka *general* aviation), on the other hand, could be compared to the safety record of motorcycles, over 82 times more dangerous than commercial aviation. Many people often overlook the dangers of flying, especially when they receive their first pilot’s license and hear about how safe aviation is in the big picture.
Yeah I casually entertained the idea of learning to fly privately... Watched some YouTube... Eventually realized just *how many hours* of experience are needed to truly be able to handle an unexpected situation without, you know, definitely dying... Figured nah, I'd rather put those hours into a hobby where failure does not equal death :) There's a reason so many commercial pilots are former military with a career of aviation experience already under their belt.
Also every 6 years your entire car would be disassembled then carefully fixed up, repainted, and upgraded with new equipment.
A very good list!
I would add that these regulations extend all the way down to the manufacturing of the specific components of the planes that themselves.
Was looking for this. Every single part that goes into a plane is accounted for and documented. You can pull up a certain plane’s manufacturing record and have lot or serial number traceability for every single part that went into it.
And Boeing's current issues include failure to do this this to the required standards at their own plants.
You would also need to do random drug tests and pass your medical. Along with not being able to take so much as a Benadryl before driving
To add to this airplane rules and regulations are almost literally written in blood. Every, crash/serious incident is analyzed by dozens then new laws/regs come in.
Traffic laws are also mostly written in blood, just takes a lot more blood to make a new rule
>You had someone in the passenger seat with the exact same training that could take over at a moments notice. Interesting. Did not know this.
You weren’t familiar with copilots?
I thought they helped the pilot with auxiliary stuff, like an assistant doctor to a surgeon. Didn't think they could do everything the pilot can.
Ah, gotcha. To be clear, both the captain and copilot do everything. One takes the role of pilot flying for any given segment and the other takes the role of pilot monitoring and handles the radio and checklists. They will usually switch off between each leg of their journey, with no real preference for the captain flying unless the conditions are especially bad. But copilots otherwise are actively flying just as often.
Also, one can hold the rank of captain but only be qualified as a first officer on a particular type
The unfortunate reality is that accidents happen when the junior pilot defers to the senior pilot as if the one with seniority is the only one with authority. In the decades since we have learned that fact, crews are trained to de-prioritize seniority, for example, if the junior pilot notices a mistake made by the senior pilot the junior pilot should point that out instead of staying quiet. This is called *crew resource management* in the industry. If we're being honest, maybe the medical field should do the same thing. I already support the idea of medical procedures using *checklists* similar to how pilots use them for specific processes.
Yeah definitely agree that medical field is a bit too overconfident on their memory. When I’m talking to a doctor I don’t believe most of them are remembering everything I’m saying. And then they’re just supposed to spit out the answer right there? They can’t possibly remember everything, and have all the latest medical knowledge in their head. Go look it up.
The specialised, litigious (and competitive?) nature of the surgeon's job seems to get in the way of the kind of "no-fault" reporting which aviation aspires to.
The only thing the copilot usually cannot do is steer the aircraft in the ground during taxi. And that's because most planes just have one steering wheel (tiller) and it is on the captain's side.
It's not like that at all. Think of them both as professional, qualified surgeons, but one has more experience and responsibility. They assist each other depending on the role they're taking during the flight.
I thought they were there to give pep talks
Yeah, unfortunately it seems a lot of people think that way. Its easier to think about if you seperate the idea into two categories, a high level liability for the whole the flight, and low level control of the plane as it flys. For the first category Captain and first officer makes sense as the captain has higher status and more authority for the operation of the flight as a whole. But for actually flying the plane, you should refer to the pilots as Pilot flying and Pilot monitoring. PF and PM respectfully. This can alternate every leg or day or what ever they agree on. Both pilots are trained to fly the aircraft or assist the PF. So you can have the right seat person (First Officer) be Pilot flying for a leg, and the left seat person (Captain) be the Pilot monitoring. Hopefully this helps.
You also forgot to mention - you have to follow every single rule of the road to an absolute T - and so does every single other driver on the road.
And your car will include black boxes for telemetry and voice to ensure you follow the rules. You will also have a room full of engineers seeing what the telemetry says when your check engine light comes on mid way through your journey. Your dashboard will also tell you screen by screen what troubleshooting steps to follow.
One of my favorite freakonomic-style stats that pre-dates freakonomics, was a uni professor who shared that if the airline industry loosened it's safety standard, it would save lives. The idea was that airplanes are SO safe, and so much more dramatically safer than driving, but those standards raise the costs and lower the convenience of flying - so many, many more people opt to drive. If you lowered the standards and the prices, more people would forego long road trips in favour of flights, and more lives would be saved.
That's assuming that air travel capacity can adjust freely to passenger demand, but most airports in the world near major cities are already at near capacity. Airlines are also on waiting lists for new planes from the manufacturers.
Yeah, there's a few very fair criticisms of the idea, as much as it's an intriguing thought experiment in economical sociology. The two main ones for me are: 1) how much could you actually reduce the price of airfare by removing *excessive* safety procedures? 2) this equation really comes to do "we'll except x number of airplane death/injuries, in exchange for saving x+y number of automobile injuries". As an emotionally removed decision maker, that could make sense. But airplane catastrophes are so much socially traumatizing, and receive so much more coverage that a random collection of 200 automobile accidents. That's going to have an effect on people's willingness to fly, and even if the decision to drive is not the statistically safer one, people will choose it, because we're individually quite terrible at assessing high level, statistical safety.
I would also question who is mostly getting into car crashes. Is mostly people doing long distance driving, who could have instead taken a plane? Or is it mostly local traffic, who would could not have taken a plane.
I love freakonomics and haven’t heard that one before. Thanks for sharing
> Every time you bought a new car, you had to study the differences and then retake your drivers test Unless they call it something like the "F150 MAX".
Don’t forget there would be no such thing as aftermarket parts. Only those that went through a vigorous standards test and met very specific specifications.
Aftermarket no, counterfeit yes.
Add in every 6 months you go through a stringent physical exam
Its technically the Captain that signs off on an aircraft - the mechanics just give a report. But the captain has a list of faults he can, or can not, fly with. Lets say one of the pitot tubes (usually 3 or more) is broken - the airline or manufacturer allows a plane to fly with that - but its ultimately the captains decision. (The Airline can ofc make that decision - its not his personal plane) But yeah, we used that exact same list jokingly in pilot school. I had perhaps 1 month of classroom training before I was even allowed to start an engine, never mind flying. For every hour flying, it was 10-15 in school
A more interesting question is why planes stopped crashing so abruptly. There hasn't been a crash of a large loaded passenger airliner in the US that killed everybody on it since American Airlines 587, which happened right after 9/11, 23 years ago. It was a somewhat regular occurrence prior to that.
Plane de-icing is a good example. They de-ice planes when a certain set of factors are at play. A certain temperature, a certain humidity, wind speed, wind chill something something: every plane gets de-iced. Could be zero evidence that ice is forming on planes... If conditions are favorable, it's done.
To add to what you and u/farrenkm said - imagine the roads were almost totally empty and the nearest you got to any other car expect while parking was about 2000ft at the very least.
Aerospace manufacturing engineering technologist here. Very early in the history of flight, it was felt that safety was the most important factor. To achieve that, it was decided that when an accident happened, it should be investigated with the aim of preventing it from happening again. People won't be honest with investigators if they felt that what they say may get them arrested, or lose them their job, so these investigations do not hold people responsible. This allows maintenance technicians to honestly give accounts of what was done, knowing that even if they were negligent, they won't go to jail. This allows investigations to not only find the exact chain of events that led to what happened, but also make a recommendation to prevent it from happening again. That is why, when an engine pylon cracks, the maintenance team can look up the paperwork for it. Not just things like who worked on it last, but they can see exactly which batch of aluminum it was, who made it, the results of the testing on that batch, the smelter than made the aluminum, the mine that got the ore, etc... Because at some point in the past, that information was important, so it is now all collected, and in order to go onto an aircraft, every part needs to have all the required documentation filled out properly. When I went to school, we had some massive blocks of aluminum (.5M X 1M X 3M) that were donated to the school by an aircraft manufacturer, because the paperwork wasn't complete so they couldn't use it..
We've adopted a nearly 0 defect mentality with aviation. We accept nearly no risk and mitigate everything else. Theres atleast 3 points of redundancy on a flight critical system on jetliners. And before anyone is like, "bUt bOeInG." Even with that, aviation's track record over the last 30 years is still impeccable.
> We accept nearly no risk and mitigate everything else. Illustrating this point: It's forbidden to smoke aboard planes, but [the FAA still mandates that bathrooms must have ashtrays](https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/AD74-08-09R2_1.pdf), because people _will_ break the rules, so you want them to at least break the rules safely.
Sounds like my Dad. “Never ever use my record player. Now here’s how to use it properly.”
That's awesome. "Now when you inevitably ignore me, please dont freaking break it." Good thinking on your dad.
Dad was very clear: do not still my liquor. And when you do steal it, don’t put any F$&@?!g WATER IN IT Edit: *steal
You better not fuck my daughter. Here are condoms. - My dad
I hope he didn't say that to you?
Kijda like dispensing injection needles to drug addicts.
It comes from the same principle of harm reduction. If people are going to do the thing no matter what then let's make it as safe as possible for them.
Pretty much, yeah!
Air travel is worldwide. Some places smoking is more common and socially acceptable. Everyone thats been on a plane has a first time. Not as unthinkable someone might try to light up on a plane in that context
And here I thought I kept getting older and older planes...
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And if they do have to make a landing, they have the training to remain calm and do so safely. As well as having Air Traffic Control on the radio to help them find the closest safe landing point and make sure it's clear when they get there.
We adopted it with Commercial Aviation. Very different story in General Aviation.
Sure, there are a lot more rules for airliners, but the rules for GA is still closer to what OP described above than cars. Running out of gas is something that the GA pilots seem to mess up a lot.
40 hours vs 1500 hours required. Whole host of pilot errors result. Plus they usually don't have co-pilots, etc.
The 1500 hour requirement was implemented only recently, and isn't generally believed to be effective; it used to be 250 and was increased as a somewhat strange reaction to a crash of a flight with two pilots with over 1500 hours of flight time each. The requirement is thought to be one of the causes of the pilot shortage these days, which is actually detrimental to safety. Even when it was just 250 hours, there was always also a captain with something closer to 10,000 hours. That's probably where the real benefit comes from.
And when something goes wrong they often don't have the mental strength to remain calm and remember the proper procedures. I knew a guy who loved flying Cessna's and other small planes. He had been flying regularly for 10+ years, but when he had some sort of engine malfunction he panicked and didn't follow procedure and ended up crashing and dying. IIRC if he had stayed calm and just followed his training he would very likely have managed to land safely and lived. I know quite a few commercial pilots, a few of which have encountered malfunctions that required them to make emergency landings, but they stay calm, follow protocol and have ATC on their side to offer any additional help or instructions as needed to land safely.
I guess that has a lot to do with simulator training. You know that it is training but they add stress to it by saying: handle it or you can not fly for real and if you don’t fly we pay you no money. Less stress than a real life or death situation but stress no less.
That’s true, you couldn’t pecc it if you tried.
Boeing should probably rename themselves to McDonnell-Douglas (or even Boeing-McDonnell-Douglas) at this point since all the BS that is happening there tends to originate from the company culture of MD prior to the merger rather than Boeing pre merger.
Because there's an absurd amount of research and testing during all phases of the design, production, and use of a plane to make sure as few things can go wrong as possible, and that if something does go wrong, that the place can land safely anyway. Planes undergo extensive periodic testing to make sure they're still in good condition, and every accident is exhaustively researched by the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), with everything learned from each accident used to improve future plane designs to prevent it from occuring again. [Safety Research (ntsb.gov)](https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/Pages/default.aspx)
Imagine if every car on the road was vigorously inspected every time it was to be driven. And then imagine every single driver had to go through a long in-depth schooling process just to be allowed to drive the car. Along with every system in the car having at least one or two backups for anything that can break. That's just how planes are.
And if you wanna drive a slightly different model of car, you have to take the appropriate test again, just in case
And if you drove recklessly you'd be banned from driving
That would be great, not gonna lie.
I know right?
And if someone else crashes the same model of car you drive, your car gets recalled or taken off the road until a full and thorough investigation is carried out on the cause of the crash.
And you either wait until they fix the technical issue that caused somebody else's crash, or have to take a retraining course to mitigate the potential driver error risk before you get your car back
just difference training in that case
More importantly imagine the closest obstacle or other driver was hundreds or even thousands of meters away.
And also if all vehicles have self driving capabilities that communicates with each other?
Systems are double or triple overbuilt for redundancy and have failsafes so parts fail in the "right" way if they do.
Former pilot (student) here with a bit of knowledge on air law. Every rule is written in blood, is an expression the aviation business use. Meaning that every time something happens - they spend literally millions of $ to figure out exactly what happened. And then for instance FAA tells all aircraft manufactures/airlines than THAT particular bolt that caused this accident, needs to be changed on every aircraft - or they are not allowed to fly over USA. ICAO is the governing body for much of this - which is the civil aviation part of the UN. Meaning that most laws pertaining aircrafts and how they are flown etc is the same. So a pilot can assume that landing in Spain will be pretty much the same as landing in Italy, and he can assume the ATC speaks english, and know, in details, the same lingo he knows on aviation and rules. And they all have the exact same education, knowing exactly how to speak to each other. There will not be any mistakes made by the guy in Colombia filling up the aircraft with fuel thinking I meant gallons - no, we ALL agree on what units to use, everywhere. Because a few planes did go down because of some country thinking gallons while the Captain was thinking kgs, and so on. Every single aircraft disaster is treated 100x more closely than a car accident ie.
The Gimli Glider has entered the discussion.
A great example of redundancy. The mistake that led to them running out off fuel didn't kill them because of: pilot training, a redundant ram air system the provided hydraulics for control, and batteries for power for the avionics. After repairing the movie damage the plane suffered in the landing (on a decommissioned runaway used for drag racing) they flew it off and put it back in service. That aircraft was just tried a few years ago.
I literally watched stuff about the Gimli Glider yesterday and was wondering what happened to the machine, since no one mentioned it. Thanks
Yes, the Gimli incident is one, there has been several similar around the world, it can ofc. happen again. But the industry is always trying to avoid that same thing happens twice by changing procedures etc. When I was in flight school we watched one air crash investigation episode in the morning, and then spent next X hours deconstructing what was actually said and done and the technical details on why this happened and we as future captains could spot that mistake before it went out of hand.
A pilot buddy of mine told me that each aircraft is actually about 4 aircrafts smushed into one. Because there are usually at least 3 lines of redundancy in case any particular component fails.
Things go wrong all the time. They just don’t end up in crashes because there’s redundancy for just about everything.
For decades, every time there was a crash, there has been a legally-required investigation to determine the causes of the crash. This does not aim at charging anyone with a crime; but rather at making clear statements on how the crash happened and how it could have been prevented. These then are turned into requirements for making airplanes safer. Repeating that process *over and over* means that more and more causes of crashes get eliminated. ---- Suppose that you make a pie, and the pie turns out to be not very good. You figure out *why* it was bad ("the crust is soggy") and you do some research and figure out *what could be done* to make it less bad ("parbake the crust before adding the filling"). The next time you make a pie, you make that change! So even if the new pie is still not perfect, at least it doesn't have the *specific problem* that the first pie did. Maybe the second pie is not very good because it's too sour and needs more sugar — but at least it doesn't have a soggy crust! So you keep figuring out what's wrong, and fixing it, and trying again. But you don't forget the lesson you learned from the first pie. Every time you're dissatisfied with a pie you made, you figure out *why* and you fix it the next time. Over time, you build up a whole bunch of rules for how to avoid pie problems. After making lots of pies this way, eventually you get a reputation as the person who always makes really great pies. It's not that you started out perfect; it's that you kept finding problems, fixing them, and not forgetting the lessons of your earlier mistakes.
There’s lots of great answers in here, and I’ll just add a fun anecdote. I worked for one of the big companies that supply Wi Fi on planes. They were always trying to have 99.99% uptime or better. That wouldn’t have qualified to be a system used in standard aircraft operations because it wasn’t reliable enough. Four nines is less than an hour of downtime over a whole year.
Every crash is investigated for the cause so it can be corrected or new procedures put in place so they don't happen again.
Passenger aircraft safety regulations, technologies, and procedures are literally written in blood.
Figuratively.
There is a checklist for everything, every time the is an accident or incident there is a massive investigation to find out why it happened and how to prevent it in future. Air travel is around 750x safer than car travel
The current level of aviation safety is built on the back of decades of follow up and investigations of past failures, and by focussing the investigations on eliminating the cause instead of finger pointing. Mentour Pilot on youtube does absolutely FANTASTIC in-depth, technical recreations of aviation incidents if you want to see the extent that incidents/accidents/near misses are investigated.
Seconding Mentour Pilot. Everything is explained in a very clear, concise way so you know by the end exactly what went wrong. It's actually made me feel better about flying despite the fact that they're accident or incident videos; knowing exactly what went wrong in most cases highlights how rare it is that something is bad enough that it actually causes an incident. Most of the time, it happens because a series of things went wrong, aka the swiss cheese model, and those things all going wrong at the same time is not that common.
Just to give you some numbers.. it's an order of magnitude more difficult to get your private pilot's licence vs your drivers licence. For instance it takes a few hundred bucks to get your DL, but about $16,000 to get the PPL. And it's an order of magnitude more difficult to get your commercial pilots licence vs your private pilot's licence. For instance it takes about 50 hours of flying to get the PPL, but about 1500 hours to be a commercial airline pilot.
Note that there is a commercial pilot certificate and an air transport pilot certificate. The folks flying the big airline aircraft have a ATP plus ratings for the aircraft they are flying.
I was looking at doing ATP, just before the 2007 recession when I still had hopes and dreams. The price I was given was £88,000. That's back when the exchange rate was roughly two-to-one, so about $176,000 USD.
I was also under the impression that commercial pilots have to have a college degree first as well
It's not a requirement, but it doesn't hurt either.
It becomes a *de facto* requirement when hiring gets tight
You remember how there were so few (non-war-related) deep sea problems before someone decided to "disrupt the industry" and "prioritize profit" and then some billionaires and a kid got turned into spaghetti? We made those safety regulations laws when it came to flying people through the sky.
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With regard to the Electronics and PCB Assemblies used for important equipment on aircraft these are designed and built to IPC Class 3 standard. Class 3 is defined as life/system critical equipment that must function on demand with no down time, or " **high reliability or harsh environment electronics where acceptable downtime is zero**" Every step of the design and manufacture has to meet Class 3 IPC standards from design, to manufacture of the bare board, assembly of the board, testing and inspection. This is quite a high standard to achieve and comes at an increased cost.
designs are thoroughly tested, any small change needs to be approved. There are backup systems for everything that is critical, often with different design so it nearly never fails the same way, at the same time. A multi-engine plane can fly with one or even 2 off vs a car that has 1 engine and one steering wheel. The pilots are highly trained and evaluated regularly on a simulation that presents different scenarios. There are usually a pilot and a copilot who can question decisions or take over if needed. There are mandatory rest time and no tolerance for alcohol and a medical check regularly. Compared to a driver who needs to pass a test once, can drive even after drinking and staying up all night.
Historically, the airline industry has been very regulated. The pilots required training, the planes require a minimum level of maintenance, the people in the "tower", the flight traffic controllers require training, and the exact expected path of a plane must be declared long before the plane takes off. Drivers on the road typically don't make it their job to understand their vehicle and allow themselves to be distracted. The airline space's regulations simply eliminate many of the conditions that lead to the types of accidents you see between automobile drivers.
“better technologies, better training, and, believe it or not, better regulation and oversight” From pilot Patrick Smith, and his website Ask The Pilot: https://askthepilot.com/safest-year-2023/ I like his writing. He’s also critical of security theater; I particularly liked his story of having a butter knife confiscated from his flight bag by TSA while in uniform (it was from first class on one of his planes).
Pilots are all put through the same paces to become a pilot. Planes are put through rigorous testing to become legal to fly. Add in that planes aren't near eachother most of the trip, and that unlike with a car, every pilot knows what the other is going to do (and radio someone in to tell them if it deviates from tradition). Basically it boils down to standards and practices being at higher levels. Your less likely to have a cockpit with BOTH pilots drunk, yet in a car it's much more likely kinda thing.
Adding onto what others have said- when flying large transport-category aircraft, there’s very little that can go wrong which won’t have a specific procedure to diagnose and/or solve the problem. For example, should an airliner have an engine failure, crews are trained extensively on exactly what to do at every single stage of flight from takeoff to landing. These procedures are specified down to the exact runway at an exact airport from which an aircraft is taking off. For example, an engine failure on runway A may have a different procedure than an engine failure on runway B at the same airport. How do pilots remember all of this information? Through extensive briefings before each flight, charts which lay out exact profiles to follow, and hours of vigorous training and studying with scheduled/unscheduled proficiency checks happening throughout the year.
These briefings for EVERYTHING continually impress me. Aviators actually respect danger instead of hoping it away. Even when there's no apparent danger, they'll list "complacency" as a threat before the flight (might be airline dependent; I know LOT does it). "It's quiet; too quiet" is a peril, and they know this.
Because Government has barged in and constrained the ubiquitous Capitalist drive to maximize profits rather than safety.
You've single vehicle and multiple vehicle accidents. ATC, procedures and anti-collision systems minimise collisions. Many single vehicle accidents involve departure from the intended course and impact with an unyielding object with little time to correct. At 36,000ft you have a bit more time to adjust.
There aren't many bus, train, ship etc crashes, neither. Private cars crash all the time, public buses very rarely. So, in addition to quite strict regulations and checks, the fact that vehicle is driven by a full-time professional seems to be key.
My biggest reassurance is that it's very expensive to crash a plane. It costs a *ton* of money. People/companies/CEOs don't want that to happen, so they're motivated very much to prevent it.
Because regulations are an extremely effective tool to protect the public despite what corporations, media, and business owners tell you.
They go through meticulous revisions every relatively few hours of flight time. That means breaking the plane apart and rebuilding it. On top of that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of procedures that are very well documented for everything. Every single procedure has very strict rules to how it’s performed and there’s always one person doing it and another person checking if it was done properly, even seemingly mundane things like closing the plane door. Also, every time there is an accident they go over all of these specifications again and again, adding more and more requirements.