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The Crash of United Flight 232 (2017)

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Re: The Crash of United Flight 232 (2017)

#61
post #10

With all the attention given to the 737 MAX lately, it's easy to forget that airline travel is dramatically safer today than it was just 30 years ago when this incident took place. Fatalities per revenue passenger-mile have decreased by a factor of 15x from 1989 to 2018 (and 54x from 1970 to 2018) [1]. [1] https://theblogbyjavier.com/2019/01/02/aviation-safety-evolu...

Commercial airline travel, yes. Fatality rates from personal and private aircraft rival automobiles.

Is that just because personal and private aircraft tend to have fewer passengers? If we measure fatality by "per mile flown" instead of "per passenger-mile" would there be a difference?

Re: The Crash of United Flight 232 (2017)

#62
post #21

"A fireball and smoke rose from the middle portion of the plane as banks of seats began vaulting and somersaulting high above the flames. Some of the banks of seats were thrown far above the fuselage in great parabolas, shot as if from a cannon by the centrifugal force of the aft end of the fuselage swinging in its majestic, flaming arc. What must it have been like to take that ride, alive, aloft, alone, aware, unhur…

If there's any mercy in the universe, they would have been unconscious from the g-forces.

Re: The Crash of United Flight 232 (2017)

#63
post #8

I heard Al Haynes speak in a small group setting regarding this incident when I was in aviation college. The amount of composure they had to maintain to even get this aircraft near an airport was unbelievable.

Between the four pilots they had nearly 90,000 hours of flight time. Haynes had 30,000, of which ~7,200 where on type. Records had 20,000, Dvorak 15,000 and Fitch had 23,000. Fitch had amazingly practiced flying in a simulator with throttles-only after hearing about JAL 123. If any crew was going to land this plane, it was this one.

I heard that expression on live television in 2008 which turned out to be a nonevent: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-american-miami/faulty... I happened to be in the USA and watching this on TV and they said this about the pilot, who had some ridiculous amounts of flight experience, if I remember correctly decades in the Air Force and then even more as a commercial pilot and they said if this happens, he is the best to happen to. He landed that plane, no problems.

Re: The Crash of United Flight 232 (2017)

#67
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now assume Boeing and the FAA did their jobs and re-calculate.

So things get better over time but instead of recognizing the advances made, you take the point of view that nothing is good enough because it could have been better?

Well, you can chalk the first 737 MAX crash up to greed, hubris, bad design decisions and a generally rotten culture in a once great, engineering driven company.

Not grounding the plane after that, despite the fact that Boeing must have had the knowledge of what have gone on is corporate mass murder for profit.

you take the point of view that nothing is good enough because it could have been better?

Yes, it would definitely had been better if 346 people wouldn't have been killed by a greedy corporate behemoth, which very obviously cares much more about profits than about the people they killed. This point is pretty obvious when you listen to their mealy mouthed pr bullshit.

I trust this answers your question.

Re: The Crash of United Flight 232 (2017)

#69
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial airline travel, yes. Fatality rates from personal and private aircraft rival automobiles.

Is that just because personal and private aircraft tend to have fewer passengers? If we measure fatality by "per mile flown" instead of "per passenger-mile" would there be a difference?

Less experienced pilots, less reliable equipment, poorer planning, overconfidence.

Just one of many examples of what can go wrong: overreliance on instruments and information that is lagged vs. reality, around severe conditions, at night. Five souls lost. ATC had repeatedly advised the pilot against his course of action, to no avail.

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=83uvKWJS2os

Re: The Crash of United Flight 232 (2017)

#70
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That plane crashed because of an unpredictable freak event. The Max planes crashed because of budgets and sidestepping a poorly run regulatory body. I’m sorry, but when capitalism starts crashing planes, I tend to forget about “advances we’ve made.”

Funny you point to "capitalism" where everything in your statement points to cutting corners which has nothing to do with capitalism per se. We would not even have planes that cost hundreds of millions if we did not have a system for investments.

A fundamental principle of capitalism -- the pursuit of financial profits, that is, revenues in excess of recognised costs -- leads directly to multiple practices which prove hazardous at scale and over time.

Financial and economic theory don't recognise ecological inputs including the time and replenishment rates associated with nonrenewable resource formation. (By definition, a "nonrenewable resource" is on whose extraction or extinction rate exceeds that of its formation.) It invokes utterly nonscientific principles such as Hotellings Rule (precisely zero geological references cited) and the Rule of Capture to justify pricing and business behaviours.

Capitalism relies on and exercises externalities of pollution, risk-shifting, and cost-burden shifting to increase firm profits at a cost of larger social burden.

The legal structure of incorporation is literally a risk-externalising engine, recognised by name in some cases ("limited liability corporation"), in which risk-based costs are externalised or stoplossed. This can be useful in cases, but can also be grossly overused.

"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power" is among the shortest sentences in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, a work not given to short sentences. Financial wealth leads to political and market power, including the power to distort markets. Much of Smith's book was a criticism of such practices. That lesson is largely lost by modern boosters of the work, who instead prefer stringing together synthesised passages across hundreds of pages of multiple sections of the book to advance their own, power-centralising ideologies.

Capitalism, finance, and business have a schizoid and faulty relationship with risk. "Cutting corners" is precisely a capitalistic measure, one which arbitrages a potential cost with a present realised savings. The bet is that the potential cost will never be realised. Sometimes that's not the case, but sometimes it is, and the firms which win that bet, based entirely on luck, are rewarded by the market. The market makes no distinction between profit gained by full realisation of probabalistic costs, and profit gained by ignoring those costs, in the individual case.

(In the aggregate profile case, the risks balance out, but specific performance matters and is independent of the profile returns.)

In market returns to various goods and services, pricing behaviours of commodities (undifferentiated bulk goods), services, labour, rents, assets, and highly differentiated specialty goods vary. In particular, the iron law of wages (tending to subsistence, or lower, levels) and the law of rents (capturing all consumer surplus value) mean that over time wealth accrues to rentiers and owners of capital, at a cost of labour.

Addressing these issues would require massive changes to accounting, risk premium, and legal regimes. That same "wealth is power" dynamic means that such reforms are exceedingly unlikely, because those who benefit by false models also benefit by ensuring that those models are protected and preserved.

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