811–820 of 884 posts
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Yes. Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars. There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars A weird metric. I'd prefer travel time, not per mile. Still far safer.
One troubling aspect of this is that it appears Alaska had reason to believe something was wrong with this plane but basically ignored it. They were getting pressurization warnings on prior flights, but the only action they took was restricting the plane from flying ETOPS routes. They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without a fair amount…
[1] https://christinenegroni.com/irony-of-pilot-laying-blame-on-...
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Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars A weird metric. I'd prefer travel time, not per mile. Still far safer.
Why is it a weird metric? People travel exactly as far as they need to, not based on time.
An example? Travel to the moon would be the safest thing ever, even if 50% of the ships exploded, because of how far it is. I bet travel to Mars would the safest thing ever, based upon miles, even if 99% of the ships exploded.
Things break based upon two things. One is maintenance per trip. And each trip has riskier parts, of which start and end are parts. Planes have issues taking off and landing, a lot more than cruising. Same for space ships. Even cars have issues at start and end of trip, if you're driving very long distances.
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That's not how organizations work. You can't just slowly take out the "bad" people and replace them with "good" people and expect that to fix anything. It's the wrong mental model. Organizations are sticky. They get stuck in a rut, basically. The slow trickle of new people gets indoctrinated into the Company Way (or else selectively ejected), and the people that are able to leave often use it as a lesson of what not…
What do you call 8 bad cops and two good cops sitting at a table? Ten bad cops. Actual good cops wouldn’t associate with bad cops.
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> Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash. It isn't though. Airliners have suffered in-flight engine explosions and decompressions multiple times since 2001 without fatalities. The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in…
> The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. While I agree with your point, if the scope is scheduled airline flights in the USA, AA flight 587 crashed on 2001-11-12; globally, Egypt Air 804 on 2016-05-19. There have also been a few close calls, such as Qantas 32 on 2010-11-04, and collisions can also occur, such as that between…
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Why is it a weird metric? People travel exactly as far as they need to, not based on time.
Because when trying to compare different things (car, train, plane, space ship, etc), they all travel at different speeds, by different methods, with different categories. An example? Travel to the moon would be the safest thing ever, even if 50% of the ships exploded, because of how far it is. I bet travel to Mars would the safest thing ever, based upon miles, even if 99% of the ships exploded. Things break based up…
Airliner passenger deaths are 1 per several billion miles.
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Airplanes are inherently much, much less reliable than cars and only reach reliability through however many millions or billions of dollars worth of redundant systems and maintenance intervals and however many man-hours. That means that when you get on an airplane, you are extremely reliant on those systems and processes having been followed. We are seeing more and more that these systems and processes have been brea…
And that is why I think it is absolutely, mind bogglingly bonkers that Tesla is currently using "drive by wire" in a mass production car when this technology is not common in aviation at all. Only the huge airliners that benefit from extremely expensive maintenance schedules use full "fly by wire".
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Yes. Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars. There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
Airplanes are inherently much, much less reliable than cars and only reach reliability through however many millions or billions of dollars worth of redundant systems and maintenance intervals and however many man-hours. That means that when you get on an airplane, you are extremely reliant on those systems and processes having been followed. We are seeing more and more that these systems and processes have been brea…
You’re leaving out the biggest risk: other people. Most deaths, in planes or cars, are caused by human error. In a car you’re dependent on everyone going down the road (and there may be thousands in one trip) not drifting across the median. You’re dependent on the person coming the other way at an intersection to stop. Etc.
Traffic deaths have been climbing again after decades of decline, probably due to distracted driving. Driving is much more dangerous.
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> The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. While I agree with your point, if the scope is scheduled airline flights in the USA, AA flight 587 crashed on 2001-11-12; globally, Egypt Air 804 on 2016-05-19. There have also been a few close calls, such as Qantas 32 on 2010-11-04, and collisions can also occur, such as that between…
Now do a similar list with every road fatality following mechanical problems. We’ll wait.
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Yes. Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars. There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars A weird metric. I'd prefer travel time, not per mile. Still far safer.