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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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My father has been designing and building bespoke aircraft for 45 years, was an FAA test pilot, inspector, and trainer for most of that time, and was in the US Air Force during the Korean War. He has more aviation experience than most.
His license plate reads GO RAIL and he won’t fly commercial if he can avoid it.
e: I am not surprised.
Sure, but... commercial airliners almost never crash?
Most planes in general don’t crash, fwiw. Most trains and cars don’t, either.
But would you rather your Uber was a Camry or a Lada Niva?
Planes are vastly safer than trains.
"Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 20 times higher than for buses, 17 times higher than for passenger trains, and 595 times higher than for scheduled airlines."
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
Worth noting that the per-mile and per-trip stats are different. Planes have low per-mile rates because nobody sane is using a plane to get across town. They only use planes for long-distance trips where driving/taking the train isn’t feasible. So by default, planes will have low per-mile rates because virtually every trip is a high mileage event. In short, planes drastically water down their per-mile averages.
When you look at it from a per-trip viewpoint, cars are safer. Which makes sense. You drive to work hundreds of times per year, but maybe ride a plane twice? So a single car crash is going to be a drop in the bucket when compared to the thousands of car trips you’ve taken in your life, but a single plane crash will be a massive spike in the numbers.
I just wanted to point out how statistics can be used to justify either side. Lots of people want to rely on numbers for everything, as if statistics can’t be manipulated. But they can, and you can bet your ass that if a party has a vested interest in stats showing one result over another, a team of statisticians can figure out a way to make it happen.
In 95% of all car accidents, the driver has eaten carrot in the week prior to the accident.
you may now draw your own conclusion
TIL 95% of people eat carrots at least once a week.
I certainly don't eat them nearly as often. I also don't drive, so that checks out.
Additional consideration: How safe a car trip is, can be influenced a lot by the driver. As a frequent driver (I wished I could use trains instead, but our train system regularly sucks for many connections :( ), I feel that 95+ per cent of accidents could be avoided if the driver was driving careful themselves plus anticipating the errors of other drivers. I get into so many situations that could be dangerous for me as well, but I typically avoid the danger because I see the crazy people maneuvers coming before they execute them. My hopes are that on the occasions when I make a driving mistake, someone else will be there to watch out for me as well.
Long story short: In a plane, you\re putting your life into someone else's hand. In a car, you at least have the illusion of control, but I claim that you actually do have some control over avoiding accidents.
The same could be said of issues with flights. The difference is you're not the driver, but also there are many, many more layers of safety in flying.
Only one thing has to go wrong for a car crash, which could easily be completely out of control of the driver and their vehicle (eg another driver). Several things have to go wrong for a plane to crash, the holes in many layers of Swiss cheese have to align.
True, but statistically, the cases where a single thing going wrong causes an accident make up only a tiny fraction of car accidents. And freak accidents like "rockfall as you exit a tunnel" can also happen to planes - e.g. being shot out of the sky by russian war criminals.
Edit: additionally, capitalist corporations are by definition looking to maximize profits, meaning they cut corners - often outright criminally - which is what led to the article we're commenting on, and also to the murder of the full crew & passengers of two Boeing 737-MAX.
Still, I see no Boeing CEO charged with murder - or even manslaughter.
I doubt that's true. I think most car accidents are caused when people aren't paying enough attention - a single person doesn't do what they're supposed to do. Airline travel has built in redundancies - the two pilots only have to focus their attention fully during takeoff and landing, at altitude they have a few thousand feet to get back in control of any situation but below 10,000 feet they have a sterile cockpit with no casual conversation. Hell, a plane can lose all of its engines due to a bird strike and still manage to fly, in one case landing intact in a river with no fatalities. Then there's maintenance, airplanes are so well looked after that we identified a very clever (yet worryingly extensive) scam of fraudulent parts, before any accident happend as a result of them.
Airlines are far, far more prepared than drivers are. Obviously airlines have worse situations to prepare for, but they prepare so well that the overall risk (likelihood x severity) is lower.
Half the Boeing CEO's came from McDonnell Douglas, and with them they brought their habit of ignoring issues at the design stage then denying them until at least two fatal accidents have occurred. If they got away with it then there's no reason they won't continue to - but that's more of a symptom of corporate Wall St than airline manufacturers specifically. Before the merger, Boeing had an excellent reputation as an engineering company and behaved as such.
You're describing a publicly traded company, not necessarily all capitalist corporations. If you privately own a business you can run it into the ground if you like, or just run a little mom & pop shop that keeps its prices low so you break even. CEO's of public companies are obligated by law to pursue profits.
We're talking about publicly traded businesses here so that point is somewhat moot, but nonetheless I don't think you've demonstrated that all airliners looking to cut corners criminally. They certainly want profits - who doesn't - but most manage to stay well within the bounds of the law and safety standards. When they don't, the level of detailed investigation we get and the attention we pay might make it seem less safe, but it actually proves just how much safer the industry is.
What I meant is: this on its own rarely ever leads to an accident. Most accidents are not cars flying off the road hitting a tree on their own. Most accidents involve multiple vehicles. And at that point it is the majority of accidents where the other affected drivers did not anticipate the mistake of the one causing the accident, and did not do anything to correct for said mistake.
With regards to Boeing, sadly you are very much correct:
That's actually my main problem with this. Legislation is built to protect corporations, not individuals. When there's a conflict of interests, corporations take precedence in 9 cases out of 10.
I am not saying all airliners look to cut corners criminally, but they often demonstrate criminal energy or are criminally negligent. This is a bigger problem in the US than in Europe, I feel - our corporate greed is closely following in the US corporation footsteps, though. Our CEOs et al wish they could pull off what the US american ones can already get away with.
If you are considering two modes of transportation for a airplane-suitable trip, the per-trip stat is effectively irrelevant. If we consider a 1,000 mile trip and want to choose the safest manner of travel to the destination aircraft will statistically be the safest transportation method.
Thank you, PM_Your_Nudes_Please, for an wonderfully insightful comment on the nature of statistics in transportation accidents.
I don’t really agree. If I have two choices to make a long distance trip, drive or fly, it is safer to fly. If I’m going to the grocery store, there’s no option to fly, so using those type of trips in the calculation doesn’t make sense.
If we talk about the safety of cars vs planes, we should really only be considering trips of a distance where planes are a viable option. Even then a trips per crash seems like a far worse metric than miles per crash. You want to account for complexity of the trips still.
That’s true in general. Planes are very safe overall.
My father has some airlines he’s okay with and some he won’t fly under any circumstances. I’m not talking about overall statistics, but what he knows about the industry’s practices, including mechanical and pilot issues.
Just my .02$
Uhhhh... can we get his list of those he won't fly on?
I’ll ask next time we play VR mini golf this Saturday.
That's a bit of a myth. Large commercial planes are very save, that's true. Small planes and helicopters on the other side can be very dangerous, as they fly around in far less controlled situations. They are so dangerous in fact that being a pilot is one of the most dangerous jobs around, only behind logging.
Niva🤩
I wouldn't care because I understand how probability works.
When I’m driving down the highway, I spend as little time as possible next to semi-trailers because I’ve met loads of drivers and know how many are on heavy drugs or haven’t slept for far too long so they can meet their deadlines.
Probability-wise, it’s safe, but I don’t like it. Not everything is about raw numbers, Mr Spock.
1NR is trying hard to change that
After all of the high profile train derailments in recent history, primarily caused by decaying infrastructure, bad standards, and cutting corners, makes me wonder if there's someone with an extensive background in rail out there with a license plate that says "FLY AIR".
I guess it's really just a question of whether you take the risk you know or the one you don't.
That's cargo rail tho. Fatal passenger rail accidents are very rare and involve multiple human and system failures.
I am an Aerospace Engineer (I was an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer by trade prior to going to University) and I have spent the last 30 years in the airline industry….it isn’t as bad as you are allegedly making it out to be….pilots are not engineers either…..
Experience from the 60’s and 70’s isn’t really relevant to today’s industry- I started in the early 90’s and it’s massively different today from back then….so your point is?
I am also based in Australia so that might also make a bit of a difference because we have had no airline crashes in this country and we have a very strict Potentially Unwanted Parts (PUP’s) system and other checks and balances that because we are under EASA based regulations and not FAA ones (who, by the way allowed the PMA part system….where parts are no longer required to be manufactured by the OEM for aircraft….and I’ve got plenty of stories about that nonsense…)
So yeah…. I quite happily still fly everywhere around the world….
Yikes.
For a while I hated flying. Freaked me out even though I knew statistically it is a safe form of travel. Then I watched a bunch of Air Disasters shows and realized how many fixes they have put in place and I felt a lot better about flying.
Then I subbed to /r/AviationMaintenance. I really don't want to fly anymore.
The whole Boeing Max shitshow is why flying makes me nervous now.
Flying is still safer than driving, FWIW. Not sure if that makes you feel better about flying or worse about driving (for me it’s the latter).
It's kinda weird actually how normalized driving is. There's a lot of people who are so scared of flying that they won't do it. But far fewer people take such an approach to being in a personal vehicle, despite being massively more dangerous.
I think it's because car deaths are just so normalized that most people are numb to them. It's kinda like that iconic Joker monologue about how it's "all according to the plan". People are afraid of exemplary things, not the mundane things that will actually kill them.
Also, not driving is not really an option in a lot of places. Driving terrifies me, but I just have to deal or not eat 🤷♂️
The first time I went skydiving, my instructor was a retired aircraft mechanic. He said something along the lines of “People always ask me why I’d want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. I tell them that I worked on planes for 30 years, and there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.”
Used to think it was statistically safe, then 737MAX crashes happened. Not trusting any airplane manufacturer any more.
Sounds like my dad, who after working as a computer programmer consultant since the early 70s, has become a Luddite, to the point that he won't even wear a digital watch. I wonder what a railroad engineer would tell your father.
It would not take much for a boiler on a train to blow, I'm sure there were all sorts of corners cut.
Do Diesel engines even use boilers? I know electric ones don't. You don't see a whole lot of functioning steam engines these days. They are neat though. Noisy AF.
I thought you were talking back in the day when you referenced railroad engineers talking to op's father. Ie even way back when the people that ran old steam locomotives had the same opinion.
Funny enough my FIL was a train engineer for steam engines but transitioned to maintaining boilers at a hospital as most steam engines were being phased out early in his career.
My dad is the opposite of a Luddite. At 88, he still works for the airplane manufacturer, builds his own computers, and is getting into VR.
The FRA (federal railway administration) is scary. I would trust a train for sure.
Wasn't everybody saying the opposite like 3 months ago?
The regulation on passenger rail is MUCH stronger then on freight.
That’s freight rail. Freight rail is a full blown late-stage capitalist hellscape. Aging infrastructure that hasn’t seen maintenance since the New Deal, companies that refuse to update equipment because paying out lawsuits when it breaks is cheaper, overworked employees who aren’t even allowed to call out sick, etc…
Compared to that, passenger rail is a fucking pipedream.
Well I guess it's not mechanic failures of the train that derails them.
Perhaps, but you don’t have as far to fall.
(e: oh, I mistook your comment for sarcasm. Ignore my reply; I agree.)
Ergo, less time to contemplate your last moments. I like it.
Once you've seen the sausage made it's hard to love sausage. Doesn't mean the sausage is terrible, it just makes you think of watching it get made.
Earlier this year a bunch of people got stuck on a 4 hour Amtrak ride for like 18+ hours, without power, toilets or water. Were told they couldn't leave and not allowed/able to transfer to another train.
I'd rather just die in an incredibly rare plane crash than trust AmTrak to get me across the country in days versus a flight which can get me there in hours.
They need budget to actually upgrade their fleet.
That’s happened multiple times with planes, not just once last year.
It happened as recently as last month
Here are more:
July 2023
June 2023
December 2022
May 2022.
I could keep going, but this is hard on mobile.
Point is, that happens with planes, too. That’s a logistics issue, not about the method of transport.