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Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

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Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#71
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That study compared car crashes during Covid lockdown (when people drove far, far less) to gunshot deaths for 1-19 year olds. The overwhelming majority of gun violence is the US is gang activity which is populated heavily by 18 & 19 year old adults. If you consider them "children" for one study, yep, you'll get misleading results.

That study, which was linked to by me and another person, includes this chart, which shows that falling youth motor vehicle deaths and rising youth gunshot deaths are both long term trends https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...

Both of those trends show decreasing deaths until about 2013, after which point they began rising again. Notably, the gunshot death curve resembles the overall US homicide death curve, and we have a pretty good idea what was driving that trend.

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That study, which was linked to by me and another person, includes this chart, which shows that falling youth motor vehicle deaths and rising youth gunshot deaths are both long term trends https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...

Both of those trends show decreasing deaths until about 2013, after which point they began rising again. Notably, the gunshot death curve resembles the overall US homicide death curve, and we have a pretty good idea what was driving that trend.

I'm reading this pretty differently from you, I think. In my view, it looks like until 2013, car deaths were dropping dramatically, and have mostly been bouncing around a steady state since. Whereas deaths were dropping slightly until 2013, and have increased significantly in the years since that. The 2020 car deaths value is close to the 2013-2020 average, but the 2020 (and 2019, and 2018, and 2017) gun deaths are higher than the 2013-2020 average.

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of those trends show decreasing deaths until about 2013, after which point they began rising again. Notably, the gunshot death curve resembles the overall US homicide death curve, and we have a pretty good idea what was driving that trend.

I'm reading this pretty differently from you, I think. In my view, it looks like until 2013, car deaths were dropping dramatically, and have mostly been bouncing around a steady state since. Whereas deaths were dropping slightly until 2013, and have increased significantly in the years since that. The 2020 car deaths value is close to the 2013-2020 average, but the 2020 (and 2019, and 2018, and 2017) gun deaths are h…

Yeah, my claim was simplistic, but the overall idea holds: in both cases there was a marked downward trend until an inflection point in 2013. For gun deaths, that inflection point was a reversal of the downward trend, and for traffic deaths it was an increase followed by a decrease, followed by an increase, but on average since 2013 it's probably pretty level. In whichever case, my point was that it doesn't make sense to characterize traffic deaths as a "long term downward trend" nor to characterize gun deaths as "a long term upward trend".

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#74
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anomalous maneuvers are exactly those used to recover from stalls and the like.

Would it be possible to detect stalls and other situations that could override the copilot requirement? I’m wondering what happens when the M/S death rate is 100x the stall death rate; would engineering controls would be added?

Yeah. You could even automate a response that commands the plane to pitch down so that it never stalls! (Changing flight controls around stall behavior is how Boeing 737 Max planes behaved.

In all seriousness, check out AF447. The plane crashed because the pilots were inputting different commands on the control stick and the plane picked the wrong one

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#75
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the choice between more deaths and noisier crazies, well, you don't have to listen to the crazies. Except when they get elected, I suppose.

I like how you jump directly to crazy from gp's "contigent of people saying the media is hiding the truth". Do you see how your response is part of the problem? Instead of addressing issues brought up, its just a label slap and then dismissal. Yeah there are real crazies who also say those things, but they are dwarfed by the amount of normal people who don't trust media and with many good reasons. I have a feeling it…

>contigent of people saying the media is hiding the truth

Go start a media organisation, publish, go on social media, bring the truth to the people. Nobody will stop you. That's all just tosh. When I was a teenager here in the UK I used to be able to buy the English edition of Pravda in my local newsagents. In fact you can read the latest edition right now [0], thought it's a lot less risible these days.

Yes news organisations often have an agenda, but they're all different agendas and doing a complete end run around them has never been easier. Don't trust them. Do your own thing. The whole hiding the truth meme isn't even CS bull anymore, it's just stupid. The free world is awash with every conceivable opinion.

[0] https://english.pravda.ru/

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#76
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video of the plane going down is enough to strongly suggest it. It was almost completely nose-down before it hit the ground, which is basically not going to happen without the pilot commanding it.

This is also (IIRC) how one recovers from a stall, so it could be a “malign” command, a best-effort at fixing a bigger problem, or anything in between.

You lower the nose to unload the wing and simultaneously increase power. That puts you a maximum a few degrees nose down, nothing like this incident's angle.

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#77
post #46

It all comes down to the mental health stigma. Even hinting at the slightest bit of mental distress can be enough to lose your medical certificate and end your career. It's no wonder that the pilot population would be more susceptible to the consequences of untreated mental illness.

It's a catch-22 situation. You'd like to avoid unstable people to pilot the plane, but any atempt to filter out unstable people would lead to people hiding the condition and enduring untreated mental disease, what makes the situation worse. I don't see much to be done, beyond screening people that are entering the profession, and then ensuring the work conditions don't make people sick afterwards. When the Germanwing…

The easy solution is to allow doctors to make fit-for-flight decisions instead of the FAA.

If a doctor, or panel of flight doctors ok’s you to fly, then why does the FAA have final say?

I don’t care if my pilot has treated depression and a doctor says they are fine(currently an administrative disqualification). I very much care if my pilot is hiding/denying their depression and not getting care because they could lose their flight status.

The standard advice about getting a flight medical is to only answer what is asked and to volunteer nothing.

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of like how child mortality in car crashes has decreased below gunshot deaths. And all other pediatric causes of death are now dwarfed by those two.

I don't think child mortality in car crashes has decreased below gunshot deaths. There was a recent economist headline which suggested that gunshot deaths surpassed car accident deaths for young people , but they defined "young people" as 1-24 year olds so as to exclude infant mortality deaths on the low end of the age range and include gun deaths on the high end of the age range. The latter is the most important bec…

> the same thing as overall homicides: changes in policing over the last decade.

Not obvious to me that's the cause, or even the nature of the changes you are suggesting a) happened and b) are the cause. Citation?

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#79

That chart of deaths looks fishy. It shows a lot more deaths from 2011-2020 than from 2021-2022. Which seems completely obvious. Of course there is more deaths in 10 years than there is in 1.5 years. Unless they intend to say "deaths per year", but that's not on the lable at least. Numbers for 2020 and 2021 are useless anyway due to reduced number of flights. It looks like someone wants to push their political agenda…

The label could have been “2020s so far” instead of “2021-2022” but the intention is quite clear, isn’t it? to show the death in the last four decades. Poor choice maybe. What is fishy about it?

> Numbers for 2020 and 2021 are useless anyway due to reduced number of flights.

As opposed to standstill air traffic after 9/11?

Re: Murder-Suicides by Pilots Are Vexing Airlines as Deaths Mount

#80

That chart of deaths looks fishy. It shows a lot more deaths from 2011-2020 than from 2021-2022. Which seems completely obvious. Of course there is more deaths in 10 years than there is in 1.5 years. Unless they intend to say "deaths per year", but that's not on the lable at least. Numbers for 2020 and 2021 are useless anyway due to reduced number of flights. It looks like someone wants to push their political agenda…

Agenda or not, the whole point of the chart is to show that row with 132 deaths as a solid statistic. At the bottom of the same chart: "* Unconfirmed" in small print. Classic.

Why is it the whole point? The chat is about aviation fatality caused by pilot suicides, not to show “132 death as solid statistic”.

Also, the small print is “March 2022 China Eastern Crash is likely intentional, but unconfirmed”. You took out the important first part. The article has four paragraphs that discusses this specific event, yet you choose to go with a small print.

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