4 ms·

I know nothing of the industry, so everything that follows is guesswork. I'd say airlines are a sweet spot because we are probably near a technological local-o

I know nothing of the industry, so everything that follows is guesswork. I'd say airlines are a sweet spot because we are probably near a technological local-optimum. We are not constantly evolving new paradigms for the industry, rather just incrementally improving the old one. If post-mortem culture in the industry results in "fighting the last war", then that probably does little harm, at worst it adds in incremental cost. In the mean-time there is still incremental techonolgical improvment giving us more head-room in the cost vs. safety trade-off.

rossdavidh 9y ago
Well this makes some sense, since the speed of sound pretty much stopped technological progress toward every-higher speeds a few decades past.
- jodrellblank 9y ago
  Really? The ancient ones, the humans who lived before my birth - those who launched rockets to the moon and detonated city destroying bombs with atomic power, feats no country has matched in these declining years of civilisation - they also had faster than sound passenger aircraft. Although it might be the tendency to exaggerate stories with time, rose-tinted glasses and the myth of the noble-savage.
  - taneq 9y ago
    There's a common theme amongst many of those heroic feats: They tended to occasionally catch fire, fall out of the sky and/or explode at inopportune times. It's the difference between prototype and a production. The Saturn V rocket and the Concorde were both prototype-grade vehicles. The marvel of them is that they worked at all. Now that we've proved the point, we won't put either "into production" unless it's reliable enough to be boring.
    - jodrellblank 9y ago
      'Production quality' things spontaneously catch fire these days, too. http://www.theclever.com/20-dangerous-cars-with-the-highest-risk-of-spontaneous-combustion/ http://www.theclever.com/20-dangerous-cars-with-the-highest-...

rossdavidh 9y ago

Well this makes some sense, since the speed of sound pretty much stopped technological progress toward every-higher speeds a few decades past.

jodrellblank 9y ago
Really? The ancient ones, the humans who lived before my birth - those who launched rockets to the moon and detonated city destroying bombs with atomic power, feats no country has matched in these declining years of civilisation - they also had faster than sound passenger aircraft. Although it might be the tendency to exaggerate stories with time, rose-tinted glasses and the myth of the noble-savage.
- taneq 9y ago
  There's a common theme amongst many of those heroic feats: They tended to occasionally catch fire, fall out of the sky and/or explode at inopportune times. It's the difference between prototype and a production. The Saturn V rocket and the Concorde were both prototype-grade vehicles. The marvel of them is that they worked at all. Now that we've proved the point, we won't put either "into production" unless it's reliable enough to be boring.
  - jodrellblank 9y ago
    'Production quality' things spontaneously catch fire these days, too. http://www.theclever.com/20-dangerous-cars-with-the-highest-risk-of-spontaneous-combustion/ http://www.theclever.com/20-dangerous-cars-with-the-highest-...