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You're right that there's a natural alignment of incentives between pilots and their passengers, but as wnevets points out above there are other critical partic
by paol 11y ago
You're right that there's a natural alignment of incentives between pilots and their passengers, but as wnevets points out above there are other critical participants in the system that aren't travelling in the plane.
Your "binary nature of problems" comment is wrong though. First common misconception: statistically the most probable outcome for someone involved in an airplane crash is survival, not death [0]. Second misconception: investigations routinely happen for incidents not resulting in crashes. In fact the whole point of promoting self-reporting of incidents by pilots is so that such investigations can be conducted for incidents that would otherwise never be known.
[0] https://app.ntsb.gov/doclib/safetystudies/SR0101.pdf https://app.ntsb.gov/doclib/safetystudies/SR0101.pdf
- ksdale 11y agoThat's a very excellent point about other critical participants. I appreciate the additional information! I didn't mean to sound like I thought that people die all the time in airplane crashes, merely that the median mistake is way less likely to affect a passenger, which is a major criteria for deciding to punish in other professions. Every mistake a lawyer or doctor makes can hurt clients or patients, respectively, whereas for most mistakes a pilot makes, no one will even know they made it (except if they self report, which they do a lot as you pointed out). And then I added in the ill-advised part about dying, by which I was really trying to communicate that the really bad outcomes are so bad that punishment is the last thing on people's minds.
- paol 11y ago> punishment is the last thing on people's minds I wish. Just off the top of my head, there was the swiss air traffic controller who was murdered by some relative of one of the victims of a mid-air collision [0], and the Brazilian government trying to put the surviving crew of another mid-air collision on trial [1]. Someone with better memory could surely think of more examples. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_collis... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gol_Transportes_A%C3%A9reos_Flight_1907 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gol_Transportes_A%C3%A9reos_Fl...