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Why you've never been in a plane crash

asteriskmag.com

211–220 of 310 posts

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#211
post #199

Great 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…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...

TIL that car fatalities were declining until 2019, and then reversed and are getting worse.

What happened in the last five years? Safety features of the cars themselves are improving (emergency braking). Alcohol may be a factor, but why in the last five years? Cars have been big for a while. WFH probably reduced commuting time. Other countries appear to be on the decline.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#212
post #199

Great 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…

r/fuckcars has members who deflate and slash car tires that belong to vehicles they deem "too big". Do you support that methodology?

I've seen hundreds of posts on that sub, but never anything approaching what you're describing. Do you have an example?

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

r/fuckcars has members who deflate and slash car tires that belong to vehicles they deem "too big". Do you support that methodology?

I've seen hundreds of posts on that sub, but never anything approaching what you're describing. Do you have an example?

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/xr64d8/deflating_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/xo6uqu/my_option_...

Cursory search turned these up.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#214
post #63

>> 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. If people die in an accident, blameless postmortem shouldn't be the answer but accountability. Otherwise events like the MCAS disaster would be just an "happy accident" with no one to blame.

"Blameless", in this instance, is referring more to individual people, not absolving organizations and processes of responsibility (assuming no negligence). The ideal it's trying for is to approach an accident not as a wrong to be avenged with punishment but a technical failure to be understood, allowing changes to be made to prevent it from reoccurring.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#215
post #209
post #199

Great 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…

The cognitive dissonance people have around this issue is astonishing. We are willing to ground the 737MAX fleet when a few people get a (surely terrifying) open air flying experience; but 44,000 people are killed on the road in the US _every_ year (and rising!) and very few people seem to care. In most age cohorts, death by car is the largest killer. In the US you have a 1 in 107 chance of dying in a car crash in yo…

I too have thought a lot about this cognitive dissonance. I think that there are several differences to the two issues, and so, in people's attitude towards it too.

One, I think, is that flying is something that is being done to us, and driving is something that we do ourselves. So the agency, the point of view is very different. Something bad happening while being passive is much more horrifying because of the powerlessness.

The other is that cars and driving environments differ a lot, while planes are much more similar to each other. What I mean by this is that it's easier to dissociate the car deaths, because that happens to some other people over there, nothing like me, but plane badness happens to everyday folk in a big winged tube, like me.

I think that if we drove the planes ourselves, the issues would be much more similar. And similarly, if everyone took the train, the bus, or a ship, and similar things would happen to a train, bus or ship, the freakout would be similar to what we see now with planes.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#216
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All those engineers need to be hauled up because they’re killing people. Software engineers by contrast are high performance: barely any fatalities and so much value created. It’s why it’s not construction firms that are the most valuable companies but software companies. You can count on software engineers to build things that won’t kill, for the most part. Other kinds of engineers, on the other hand, are constantly…

I have a friend who works in a hospital. Apparently the hospital software they use constantly freezes for like, 30+ seconds while they're trying to get work done.

Meanwhile my friend has had her passport, entire medical history and all sorts of personal information leaked by Medibank then Optus, within a few months of each other. Neither company as far as I can tell has been held in any way to account for the blunder.

Meanwhile the Post Office Scandal is rocking the UK - where a software mistake landed a bunch of completely innocent people in jail and led to multiple suicides.

And don't even get me started on the impact of social media.

We might not kill as many people as engineers. Maybe. But we certainly cause more than our share of harm to society.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#217
I had the privilege to work at a company that _actually_ had "blameless postmortems." That phrase is easy to say, but when you're on-call and get woken up at 3 in the morning to deal with someone else's mess, let's just say "blameless" isn't _my_ first reaction.

However--getting to the root of the issue, allowing everyone involved come up with solutions, and continuously improving the runbook is clearly the best way forward. Sure, it's reactionary, but proactive guidance is never going to be as imaginative in breaking things as production traffic.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen hundreds of posts on that sub, but never anything approaching what you're describing. Do you have an example?

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/xr64d8/deflating_... https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/xo6uqu/my_option_... Cursory search turned these up.

I don't necessarily know that you can conclude from a few memes that people are actually out there doing this, I see it more as venting frustration. They're certainly advocating for it, though.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#219
post #199

Great 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…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_... TIL that car fatalities were declining until 2019, and then reversed and are getting worse. What happened in the last five years? Safety features of the cars themselves are improving (emergency braking). Alcohol may be a factor, but why in the last five years? Cars have been big for a while. WFH probably reduced commuting time. Other countries appear to…

The reaction to the pandemic normalized not caring if other people live or die as long as you aren't personally inconvenienced.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

r/fuckcars has members who deflate and slash car tires that belong to vehicles they deem "too big". Do you support that methodology?

I've seen hundreds of posts on that sub, but never anything approaching what you're describing. Do you have an example?

The vandals in question call themselves "Tyre Extinguishers". Search for that phrase in that subreddit, and you'll see it's full of people defending them.
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