Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you didn't read the post. It's not an assumption, it's the explanation of why.
No, but I read the clickbait title.
This is far more insufferable than clickbait titles.
Why you've never been in a plane crash
191–200 of 310 posts
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
SOLAS (Safety Of Life At Sea) an international convention (ie International Law agreed by most countries) is indeed in big part a result of Titanic. SOLAS covers a lot of safety improvements and has continued to improve over time especially after a later version of the treaty makes updates "tacitly accepted" basically instead of signing treaties periodically the members agree that they're all automatically bound by a…
But, even though you would very rarely need them, likely never for a vessel which operates close to shore, they must be maintained periodically because SOLAS, and maintenance of lifeboats is pretty dangerous because they're on the outside of a ship. So you may end up killing or seriously injuring more people by having lifeboats. Did the designers of the Titanic write this? You're arguing having enough lifeboats for a…
I'm confident that I did not design the Titanic, a ship launched before my grandmother was born IIRC, however yes, I'm saying that this trade might well not be worth it in the bigger picture, not for all the ships covered by SOLAS.
Titanic is the sweet spot for wanting more lifeboats, they had a long time, but they were in the middle of the ocean and nobody was coming to help.
If you go down very quickly lifeboats are useless. Herald of Free Enterprise could have had ten lifeboats per customer, wouldn't have made a difference, there were 90 seconds between nothing is wrong, and oops the ship is laying on its side in the water, lots of people are going to die in that scenario.
On the other hand if the port isn't far you can make for port. Despite a ship being on fire, or badly holed it may have hours left, the Titanic had almost three hours.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that measure a loss of 1 second would be $7k lost revenue. A 100ms outage would be $700. Reality is that revenue wouldn't be lost if you had a 100ms outage, it wouldn't even be noticed.
It doesn't scale linearly.
Indeed, so arguing that if revenue is 24m a day that a 1 hour outage loses 1m is wrong
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
There's a reason it doesn't. The last thing any pilot or controller would want is to have something sensationalized or misconstrued and then spewed all over social media.
United Airlines used to have this back in the days where your seat had an audio jack and a few channels of music to listen to. Channel 9 was the audio from the cockpit.
Nowadays you can listen to ATC from nearly anywhere by visiting https://liveatc.net/
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#195Earlier 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.
I'm am engineer by many definitions, although I don't have or wear a stripey hat, so not the most important definition. I'm not licensed though and have no signoff rights or responsibilities. If I were to consider signing off on my work or the work of my colleagues after review, the industry would have to be completely different. I have been in the industry for more than 20 years and I can count the number of times I…
Any software system that might produce legal evidence should also be an exception… it feels a bit too much of a common case to call it an exception though.
(This is in reference to the Horizon scandal, yes.)
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#196Except 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.
Sorry for your loss. I hope something was learned by others so it will not happen again.
Thanks, unfortunately it was primarily pilot error so I doubt it. The pilot also passed
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think a company taking things seriously would view it as a gift from the heavens, but the fact that Boeing is seeking an exemption for certification doesn't really seem like they're putting safety ahead of profits.
Like many large corporations they are no longer in the product development business but the capital management business.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#198Earlier 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…
> An engineer "signing off" on something actually means something, with actual stakes.
It's all about the social impact of a mistake.
The reason "engineers" sign off stuff is not because they are engineers. It's because society frowns upon people dying due to a faulty building, wants to see those responsible for the disaster punished and not be behind another project again.
Society's response to ensuring incompetent professionals can't sign off on stuff is to manage an Allowlist of individuals who can sign off, and have mechanisms in place to remove from the Allowlist those who screwed up badly.
These Allowlist are things like professional engineering institutions, and someone who is registered in the Allowlist is called engineer.
Now, does the software engineering world have anything of the sort in terms of importance in a society? No. A service crashing or a bug being sneaked into a codebase does not motivate a strong response from society demanding some people do not ever get behind a keyboard again.
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#199Great article. I agree a lot with the safety culture in commercial aviation and the commitment to investigate and fix root causes.
Now can we please apply the same standards to car crashes? The same human errors and bad infrastructure keep getting repeated over and over again. And the problems are getting worse, with SUVs and distracted driving on the rise.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/ for a community that is sounding the alarm on the insidiousness of car culture. Or see these reasonable urbanists if you think FuckCars is too extreme: https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity/videos , https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes/videos , https://www.youtube.com/@CityNerd/videos
Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash
#200One 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…
YEs. Almost everyone has seen at factories the prominently posted signs updated daily: "XX Days Since a Time Lost Accident". Some years ago, I noticed in some more technically advanced shops a change: "XX Days Since a Near Miss", along with an invitation and method to report near-misses.
Seems like progress; a near-miss noticed is indeed a real gift, if followed-up.