Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Collision

fiftytwo.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: Collision

#11

Post by pugworthy »

ignoramous wrote: post #5

Brilliant writing. It highlights many of society's problems. > At one point, the grandson of a prominent politician (Shankar Dayal Sharma) waltzed in, chaperoned by a group of sidekicks and handlers. He had no reason to be there but quickly became the centre of attention. When asked what he was doing there, he smarmily replied, "Plane curiosity." The nihilistic tendencies of the political elite in India is well docum…

What's your background? This is some pretty scathing commentary. If you're from India, I can find it interesting. If you're not, then some of your comments come off as a bit xenophobic towards India.

Re: Collision

#13

Post by ignoramous »

pugworthy wrote: post #11
ignoramous wrote: post #5

Brilliant writing. It highlights many of society's problems. > At one point, the grandson of a prominent politician (Shankar Dayal Sharma) waltzed in, chaperoned by a group of sidekicks and handlers. He had no reason to be there but quickly became the centre of attention. When asked what he was doing there, he smarmily replied, "Plane curiosity." The nihilistic tendencies of the political elite in India is well docum…

What's your background? This is some pretty scathing commentary. If you're from India, I can find it interesting. If you're not, then some of your comments come off as a bit xenophobic towards India.

Yes, I'm from India.

Other such scathing commentary, if you're up for it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20497465

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16302042

Re: Collision

#14

Post by sbierwagen »

chongli wrote: post #9
remram wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A plane is also much faster than a car, so the same comparison in terms of hours instead of miles would probably add a couple orders of magnitude.

It’s also higher variance. When a plane goes down, it’s often the case that everyone on board dies. Traffic collisions can sometimes lead to multi-vehicle pileups but they’re unlikely to cause hundreds of deaths all at once like a plane crash.

>it’s often the case that everyone on board dies.

But not always, interestingly enough. The lede mentions the Tenerife disaster, which had 61 survivors out of 644, and Avianca Flight 52, which had 85 survivors out of 158. Most accidents occur during takeoff and landing, when altitude and relative velocity are low.

Disasters caused by pure incompetence, like when the pilot of Air France 447 flew a fully functional plane into the Atlantic, are rare. So rare that the United States hasn't had a fatal crash of an airliner since 2009.

Re: Collision

#15

Post by cycomanic »

pugworthy wrote: post #11
ignoramous wrote: post #5

Brilliant writing. It highlights many of society's problems. > At one point, the grandson of a prominent politician (Shankar Dayal Sharma) waltzed in, chaperoned by a group of sidekicks and handlers. He had no reason to be there but quickly became the centre of attention. When asked what he was doing there, he smarmily replied, "Plane curiosity." The nihilistic tendencies of the political elite in India is well docum…

What's your background? This is some pretty scathing commentary. If you're from India, I can find it interesting. If you're not, then some of your comments come off as a bit xenophobic towards India.

I also found it scathing, but I thought it was quite obvious the person was from India or at least had some pretty intimate knowledge about India. While I agree that there is a line to be drawn between xenophobia and criticism I also find it dangerous to say only people from within a society are allowed to criticise it. Are Latin Americans not allowed to criticise the US for example?

Re: Collision

#17

Post by LandR »

thamer wrote: post #6

> According to one estimate, for every 1 billion passenger miles travelled by car, 7.2 people die; by plane, it's 0.07 people. Interesting to read concrete numbers for this comparison. It's well-known that air travel is much safer than cars per mile, but I didn't realize it was over 100 times safer. I'd be curious to know what this number is for fully self-driving cars once they start being used for the commercial tr…

How does this change if you look at it on number of trips?

If I get in a plane, I'm probably going hundreds or thousands of miles. But in a car it might be only a few miles.

If I flew everywhere I would go by car, is it still safer?

Re: Collision

#18

Post by SiempreViernes »

LandR wrote: post #17
thamer wrote: post #6

> According to one estimate, for every 1 billion passenger miles travelled by car, 7.2 people die; by plane, it's 0.07 people. Interesting to read concrete numbers for this comparison. It's well-known that air travel is much safer than cars per mile, but I didn't realize it was over 100 times safer. I'd be curious to know what this number is for fully self-driving cars once they start being used for the commercial tr…

How does this change if you look at it on number of trips? If I get in a plane, I'm probably going hundreds or thousands of miles. But in a car it might be only a few miles. If I flew everywhere I would go by car, is it still safer?

Wikipedia gives 22 deaths per million flights for 2002 to 2011, while england and wales have about 5 traffic deaths per day and about 15 million people commuting daily by car.

The car numbers are very rough, but flying will stay at least one order of magnitude more dangerous than driving by this measure, which makes sense: large heights are dangerous.

Re: Collision

#19

Post by davidhyde »

Are writers being encouraged to write “Zoom call” instead of “Video call” in their write ups? I know that it has nothing to do with the article, I’m just interested to know if anyone else had noticed.

> “No. It was India that took the initiative to bring it to the ICAO assembly,” said Captain Enrique Valdes on a Zoom call from the US.

Re: Collision

#20

Post by mannykannot »

ignoramous wrote: post #5

Brilliant writing. It highlights many of society's problems. > At one point, the grandson of a prominent politician (Shankar Dayal Sharma) waltzed in, chaperoned by a group of sidekicks and handlers. He had no reason to be there but quickly became the centre of attention. When asked what he was doing there, he smarmily replied, "Plane curiosity." The nihilistic tendencies of the political elite in India is well docum…

On a positive note, India acted on the findings of the inquiry and became one of the first countries to mandate TCAS. A cynic might say that doing so was cheaper for the government than upgrading its ATC radar and providing adequate staffing, but at least the former of these seems to have been done as well.
Post reply on HN