>> Why you have never been in a plane crash?
Because those who are in a plan crash are mostly dead?
Why you've never been in a plane crash
21–30 of 310 posts
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#22This is the first time I've heard of "just culture" and wish it would spread to other areas of the world and life.
The ability to drop blame from the equation is a credit to the aviation industry and would drastically improve any team, organisation, or industry to adopt it.
Exactly. When we have an incident, I want us to be very clear about who did what, what they were thinking that led them to that course of action, and the other facts about the incident. Knowing which individual took which action and when is very, very different from holding an individual responsible (in terms of suffering repercussions) from it. If team members trust they won't suffer from it, you get much clearer data, often without even asking for it.
Related, I recommend that teams subject to SOX-404 controls consider adopting a variant of FAR 91.3*. Our SOX docs explicitly permit our incident managers (and two additional high-level tech employee roles) to authorize any action they deem justified during a production emergency.
* - https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-I/subchapter-F...
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#23This is the first time I've heard of "just culture" and wish it would spread to other areas of the world and life.
The ability to drop blame from the equation is a credit to the aviation industry and would drastically improve any team, organisation, or industry to adopt it.
This very specifically works for Accidents - events nobody actually wanted to happen, where we can learn from experience and prevent it happening again.
It specifically won't work for things which were not accidents at all, where blame remains a useful tool.
There's some nuance, the Captain of the Titanic didn't intend to sink the ship and kill loads of people, in that sense it was an accident - but he also didn't need to head into an ice field at full speed. Various UK politicians didn't set out to drive postmasters to suicide, but they did give political cover to business people they must have suspected weren't being truthful.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#24...by Kyra Dempsey, a.k.a. Admiral Cloudberg, who has a long series of in-depth airplane crash investigation articles on Medium: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ This is her Medium article on the LAX runway collision: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c... - with further details that would probably have distracted from the point she's trying to make in the Asterisk article (e.g. that the…
The USAir 1493 crash happened in 1991, a decade after the PATCO controllers were fired. I have a hard time believing that there is any connection - by 1986 or 87 the controller position has already been fully properly staffed with trained controllers. Throwing the mention of PATCO in a discussion of a 1991 incident would just further a political agenda and add nothing to the discussion.
Yeah, that's probably why she didn't do it. But if you imagine having to suddenly hire 10,000+ people in conditions which made the previous occupants of those positions so frustrated that they went on strike despite not being allowed to, I guess you can't be too picky with who you hire...
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#25> The United States leads the world in airline safety. That’s because of the way we assign blame when accidents do happen.
The communists were great at assigning blame, just usually not to the right person. If I remember correctly during the VW emissions scandal [1] they tried to pin it all on one engineer. The UK Post Office similarly tried to blame Fujitsu for a systemic failure [2].
> In the aftermath of a disaster, our immediate reaction is often to search for some person to blame. Authorities frequently vow to “find those responsible” and “hold them to account,” as though disasters happen only when some grinning mischief-maker slams a big red button labeled “press for catastrophe.”
With Health and Safety (H&S) in the UK, every person is each themselves responsible for raising concerns as they see them. If something were to happen in our work place for example, I think questions would rightfully be asked of all employees 'if you saw it and agree it was dangerous, why didn't you say anything?'. To foster this all you need is a work culture that accepts criticism and is open to discussion about it.
> It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition.
It's all good and well, but the blame is then just assigned to a system with no real accountability - any accident can be explained away with tighter control measures. I remember a story about nuclear lab technicians taking photos of radioactive materials and almost causing a serious incident. I couldn't find an article on it, but it happens regularly enough at nuclear facilities [3].
You can't use a system to entirely automate your way out of negligence. If you hire people that have no drive to improve their work place, you will inevitably have issues.
Just a few days ago I was at a theme park type event and noticed that a structure that was fully on the ground (easily accessible) had been allowed to rust. Most paints for this use have a 10 year rating, but the employees were young and had no interest in the future of this place. An accident will at some point occur and some rules will be changed, but the company itself will continue to hire people with no incentive for the company's future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/safety-problems-los-...
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#26Survivorship bias?
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#27>> Why you have never been in a plane crash? Because those who are in a plan crash are mostly dead?
We don't count those that are eaten after the crash as they survived the impact and immediate aftermath.
More seriously:
But for those unlucky enough to be involved in the small percent of fatal air accidents, what are the odds of survival if your plane does crash?
The NTSB says that despite more people flying than ever, the accident rate for commercial flights has remained the same for the last two decades, and the survivability rate is a high 95.7 percent.
The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) has also examined the survivability of aircraft accidents worldwide, estimating that 90 percent are survivable (no passengers died) or “technically survivable," where at least one occupant survives.
Most of those fatalities were a result of impact and fire-related factors including smoke inhalation after impact.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#28One of the most important pieces of legislation in the UK that helped improve safety in workplaces was the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which placed a duty of care on organisations to look after the wellbeing of their staff. One of the tenets is to take near misses seriously. According to a health and safety engineer in a course I attended, near misses are like gifts from the heavens, as they show you exactly…
With the number of data breaches we see cropping up, I wonder if a similar law could be written to hold companies liable for the safe handling of personal data.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#29>> Why you have never been in a plane crash? Because those who are in a plan crash are mostly dead?
I had the same thought. You, reader, have never been in a plane crash, because if you’d have been in one, you’d be dead.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#30Related: CAST analysis http://sunnyday.mit.edu/CAST-Handbook.pdf Intended to focus on maximal learning about all factors that contributed to an accident. It subsumes several approaches, including a blameless analysis and that each factor doesn't just have a single "cause" but that different factors form a network of interaction. Also nitpicking about the headline: You haven't been in a place crash because you wouldn'…
>You haven't been in a place crash because you wouldn't be reading this if you were :)
We have a kick-ass politician in switzerland who survived a avalanche (1993) and a Plane-crash [1] (2001)