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Boeing: Last Week Tonight
(youtu.be)
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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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My uncle repaired airplanes for a living. I have never flown as an adult and I hopefully never will. Somethings I just can't unlearn. When he first started things were great, but by the time he retired it was a shitshow of cutting corners on replacement parts and who knows what else.
I wish I knew who made the plane that scared me, I remember it was a Southwest flight, oh, almost 30 years ago now.
I had a seat on the wing and the engine STOPPED. No more pleasant engine noise, just silence.
And I'm like "We're OK, there's more than one engine..."
Then the silence was broken by the sound of them trying (and failing) to re-start the engine...
"Boy, they sure seem intent on re-starting that engine..."
One of the defining characteristics of Southwest is that they ONLY fly 737s (Boeing). That and their focus on domestic flights helps them offer good rates and low/non-existent fees. I guess their maintenance only has to focus on one plane. However, it seems like they got caught up in Boeing's "737 MAX is the same plane" scam because they fly some of those too and I believe it affected their stock.
Yet flying has gotten safer and safer, statistically.
I think it's the (seeming) paradox of the information age. Visibility on issues increasing has made things seem more dangerous, even when in reality they've gotten safer.
To put it mathematically, if we see only half the failures with a 10% failure rate, we perceive a 5% fail rate. But if we see every failure for a 7% failure rate, we perceive a 7% fail rate, and it looks worse even though it's actually better.
Totally true. I read some interesting research some years ago, which I can’t find now of course, that people who speak smaller languages (ie with less global speaking population) feel safer because they simply aren’t exposed to as many bad things happening in their own language. So when a plane crashes in the US, UK people feel more impacted from it because they can see victims and relatives speaking about it in a language that feels like their home language. Though to people in Denmark that crash was “abroad”, so “nothing I need to worry about; it was far from home”.
“Near” is people who speak your language. “Far away” is people who don’t.
Commercial flying remains the safest way to travel, and it continues to get safer. That's not to minimise your reluctance to fly. I get it: if something goes wrong it's 99.9% sure you're going to die, and know about it long enough for your last moments to be horrifying. But the facts is the facts and the facts is that you're way more likely to die on a bicycle journey.
I don't buy that simply because of the metrics used to get to that "safest way to travel". Isn't it per distance traveled? That's extremely pro aeroplane.
What if it's per journey?
It's not extremely pro aeroplane, because if a plane crashes there are 100x more fatalities than in a car crash. Even so, there are more than 100x more fatalities in cars.
It makes sense that flying is safer because it's so strictly regulated. People are able to drive tired/sick/hungover but pilots aren't. Your car can have a fault that you haven't noticed where planes can't.* There's a crew operating the plane as opposed to a single driver.
*The exception proves the rule on this one