One 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…
By this logic, the recent Boeing 737 incident should be considered a gift from the heavens. Which I think is actually a good way to look at it, though we don’t yet know whether this gift will be squandered.
Why you've never been in a plane crash
181–190 of 310 posts
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#182Why don't we as a society apply similar safety culture to driving cars and trucks as we do to aviation? MANY more people are harmed or killed by automobiles than by aircraft per person-mile traveled. A small improvement in automobile safety could make a large impact on society. Many of the types of improvements implemented by aviation mentioned in this article, when applied to the automotive world, would look like im…
I can think of many reasons it's difficult, though:
* The fact that accident investigations are designed to figure out which driver was at fault, for insurance purposes
* The fact that road designers are shielded from liability (good, right?), but only if they can show they followed the standard design handbooks, which not only fail to prioritize safety over traffic flow but also don't require or even contemplate performing a thorough case-by-case investigation into how to prevent a certain type of accident from happening again. (Crash Analysis Studio tries to demonstrate how to do this.)
* The sheer scale of the changes to roads that would be needed. In the States, access of hundreds of thousands of businesses and probably millions of homes depend on roads that are supposed to get people from A to B fast but also have lots of access points for businesses on them, which is like just like mixing taxiing and holding with takeoff and landing, but without the air traffic controllers. And don't get me started about unprotected lefts across multiple lanes of traffic.
* The lack of buy-in from the citizenry for enforcing professional-like standards on drivers. Despite the blameless culture that helps identify flaws in the system, air traffic controllers, pilots, maintenance crews, train engineers, etc also know that their job depends on making a sincere effort to follow the rules that are written, and in most cases their professional identity is tied up with following the rules. (I've heard that to be a pilot you really have to be comfortable with doing what you're told, all day long.) There's really no obvious way to get the masses of drivers to think and feel that way about their driving, and of course we can't just sanction our way to compliance because people need their licenses to go about their lives. And of course usually there is no reasonably alternative to driving yourself where you need to go.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#183Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#184One 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…
Near misses are absolutely like gifts from the heavens. I was part of a post-investigation for a near miss that would've looked like this if things had gone a bit differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA-19#Damage_during_manufact...
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH having software engineer output in general be liable to some minimum safety, correctness and quality standard would be a god send for the world. But of course the developers will revolt against that.
If you want to call yourself "engineer" then at a minimum all those standards and minimum requirements should apply, no questions asked. I've heard stories of hauling civil engineers out of retirement and in front of a tribunal after some structure that collapsed before it's time, or it was found that the original design was flawed in some way. An engineer "signing off" on something actually means something, with act…
We need higher standards for engineers. They could learn from software folks. If you can’t do it safely don’t do it.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#186Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#187Except my sister and her husband died in a plane crash 2 years ago. A lot of these ultra cautious safety requirements apply a lot more to bigger commercial airlines and less to small private chartered planes.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#188Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#189Just recently is was reported that Chinese scientists were experimenting with a new Covid-like virus where every rodent that was infected with the pathogen died within eight days, which the researchers described as 'surprisingly' quick. This time it's a Pangolin virus rather than a bat one though still on humanised mice. I think a rule that anyone doing such research would have to get say $100bn liability insurance first might make them more cautious. Covid cost $12.5 trillion + according to the IMF and with deaths ~100x all aviation accidents in history.
(Pangolin virus https://www.firstpost.com/world/china-experimenting-with-100...)
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#190...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…
And if you like this sort of thing, you might also enjoy the various people that do reconstructions on YouTube - the real audio played over animations/flight sim of what the planes are doing. The most interesting/lively ones are those with a 'possible pilot deviation' or 'number to call' IMO if you want a search term to narrow them down. I'm not a pilot or planespotter or particularly interested in planes generally,…