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I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the

I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent. As for risk, Jim Lovell was asked, before he left for his second trip to the moon (Apollo 13), if he worried about the risk. His response was if wasn't an astronaut heading for the moon, he'd be back to his original job as a navy fighter pilot flying missions over North Vietnam, and he'd rather everybody be working to keep him alive than trying to kill him. And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be, in large part because it got more professionalized. If you add KIA+MIA (after this long a time, those are dead bodies that were never recovered), in World War One average US monthly losses were 6260/month, World War Two was 9865/month, Korea was 1116/month, Vietnam was 589/month, and the total combined dead from September 11th attacks, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and the operations against ISIS come out to 9766 (all numbers from Wikipedia). So the past 20 years of fairly continuous war comes out to about the dead from a single month of World War Two, for the US. That's in lockstep with the rest of the culture, we simply are much safer in every dimension.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent. The people who were test pilots in the 90s were people who succeeded under a system of massive "by the book"-ness. The cowboys of the 60s don't wind up being successful test pilots in that kind of system. The organizations changed so the people who succeed in them changed.
- mandevil 6y ago
  And test pilots regularly died in the old system, and come home to their children in the current one, so I prefer the current one. The point is that it isn't "they were test pilots, so crazy" it is "in the 1950's and 1960's a lot more death was accepted and because of that, the standards were lower."
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. Except until recently, Yeager, who passed late last year, RIP.
  - eecc 6y ago
    In the 60s you needed some crazy cowboy to try and fly a brick strapped to a gas tank. Today you simulate what happens on a Dell laptop and that’s that.
  - mattr47 6y ago
    That would be more to computer simulation before the aircraft ever takes it first flight. Test pilots from the in the 50s and 60s did not have that option.
Judgmentality 6y ago
> And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be My hunch for wars getting less deadly is because of nuclear weapons. There hasn't been a direct war between superpowers for the better part of a century. This sounds good, except it's possible we'll essentially wipe out the planet overnight because of a technical error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar... I think we need a longer timespan to say whether or not wars are getting deadlier.
- azernik 6y ago
  Fatalities have gone down even for wars of similar intensities. More important is the improvement in battlefield medicine and body armor - the KIA/WIA ratio for the US military has plummeted, from around 1:1.5 during WW2, to around 1:3 in Korea after the introduction of helicopter evacuation and more refined frontline aid stations, to just above 1:10 in Afghanistan. e.g. I strongly doubt that Tammy Duckworth's wounds would have been survivable on the battlefield in 1940, or even in 1970.
schoen 6y ago
> And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be, in large part because it got more professionalized. This seems plausible, but I wonder if what you calculated is the best way to measure it. First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the world", does the same trend hold for the people on the other side of these conflicts? At least in the past 20 years' examples, the U.S. military wasn't fighting adversaries who were equipped nearly as well as it was. Second, the number of people who fought in each of these wars is also pretty different. Isn't a more direct comparison something more like "deaths per combatant per month" rather than "deaths per month"? (I don't know how that comparison would come out.)
- kortilla 6y ago
  > First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the world" Given that we’re discussing American test pilots/fighter pilots, this makes sense.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the world", does the same trend hold for the people on the other side of these conflicts? Yeah and no. It's so hard to measure the human cost of war because so many of the deaths are indirect. Operation Rolling Thunder (50 years ago) was probably the last time the US took mass numbers of lives directly, with the high end of estimates approaching something like an average of 5,000/month. Estimates of deaths from the Iraq War range from 150K "violent deaths" to 1mil "excess deaths" which would include all sorts of indirect causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War Those are horrific levels of loss but nowhere near the toll of WWII. Second, the number of people who fought in each of these wars is also pretty different. Isn't a more direct comparison something more like "deaths per combatant per month" rather than "deaths per month"? It depends. Do we want to measure how risky it is to be a combatant, or how risky it is to be a human being on Earth? If it's the former, then "deaths per combatant per month" is what we want. That would be interesting, though I question how broadly useful it would be. It would obviously be directly useful for combatants (or those considering becoming combatants) but is probably not useful as an overall indicator of "hey, how's the human race doing in general?" If it's the latter, the stat we probably want is "war-related deaths per human being per month" or something like that. That would be a good indicator of overall levels of war and strife. It would take into account the increased population of the world as well. Even if (heaven forbid) we had a conflict that results in WWII-like absolute levels of deaths today, that would represent a far lower number of deaths as a percentage of the human population lost.
Schwolop 6y ago
Those numbers are fascinating in their own right, but even more so when compared against the staggering 35,000+ deaths per month the US is suffering right now. (467k over ~13 months of pandemic, obviously it's not evenly spread but the point is it's an order of magnitude greater than the worst ever war death rates.)
mannykannot 6y ago
You make a very valid point about casualty rates, though I am just about certain that Jim Lovell would have been eager to go regardless. Getting back to casualty rates, I think you have to at least put them on a log scale to get a feel for their impact on society, at least as long as they are less than the survivorship rate.
rjsw 6y ago
The risk isn't just from being a test pilot, there is a line in "The Right Stuff" pointing out that the chances of a Navy pilot being killed in peacetime was 1 in 4 over their career.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>I suspect that it's more a generational thing than an occupational one. I've met a couple of test pilots from the '90's and '00's and they were the some of the most by-the-book people I've ever met, they were meticulous and followed their steps precisely, even for quotidian things like making breakfast or pitching a tent. The people who were test pilots in the 90s were people who succeeded under a system of massive "by the book"-ness. The cowboys of the 60s don't wind up being successful test pilots in that kind of system. The organizations changed so the people who succeed in them changed.

mandevil 6y ago
And test pilots regularly died in the old system, and come home to their children in the current one, so I prefer the current one. The point is that it isn't "they were test pilots, so crazy" it is "in the 1950's and 1960's a lot more death was accepted and because of that, the standards were lower."
- ryandrake 6y ago
  There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. Except until recently, Yeager, who passed late last year, RIP.
- eecc 6y ago
  In the 60s you needed some crazy cowboy to try and fly a brick strapped to a gas tank. Today you simulate what happens on a Dell laptop and that’s that.
- mattr47 6y ago
  That would be more to computer simulation before the aircraft ever takes it first flight. Test pilots from the in the 50s and 60s did not have that option.

Judgmentality 6y ago

> And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be My hunch for wars getting less deadly is because of nuclear weapons. There hasn't been a direct war between superpowers for the better part of a century. This sounds good, except it's possible we'll essentially wipe out the planet overnight because of a technical error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar... I think we need a longer timespan to say whether or not wars are getting deadlier.

azernik 6y ago
Fatalities have gone down even for wars of similar intensities. More important is the improvement in battlefield medicine and body armor - the KIA/WIA ratio for the US military has plummeted, from around 1:1.5 during WW2, to around 1:3 in Korea after the introduction of helicopter evacuation and more refined frontline aid stations, to just above 1:10 in Afghanistan. e.g. I strongly doubt that Tammy Duckworth's wounds would have been survivable on the battlefield in 1940, or even in 1970.

schoen 6y ago

> And war (for Americans and the rest of the world) is a lot less deadly than it used to be, in large part because it got more professionalized. This seems plausible, but I wonder if what you calculated is the best way to measure it. First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the world", does the same trend hold for the people on the other side of these conflicts? At least in the past 20 years' examples, the U.S. military wasn't fighting adversaries who were equipped nearly as well as it was. Second, the number of people who fought in each of these wars is also pretty different. Isn't a more direct comparison something more like "deaths per combatant per month" rather than "deaths per month"? (I don't know how that comparison would come out.)

kortilla 6y ago
> First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the world" Given that we’re discussing American test pilots/fighter pilots, this makes sense.
JohnBooty 6y ago
First, since you mentioned "Americans and the rest of the world", does the same trend hold for the people on the other side of these conflicts? Yeah and no. It's so hard to measure the human cost of war because so many of the deaths are indirect. Operation Rolling Thunder (50 years ago) was probably the last time the US took mass numbers of lives directly, with the high end of estimates approaching something like an average of 5,000/month. Estimates of deaths from the Iraq War range from 150K "violent deaths" to 1mil "excess deaths" which would include all sorts of indirect causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War Those are horrific levels of loss but nowhere near the toll of WWII. Second, the number of people who fought in each of these wars is also pretty different. Isn't a more direct comparison something more like "deaths per combatant per month" rather than "deaths per month"? It depends. Do we want to measure how risky it is to be a combatant, or how risky it is to be a human being on Earth? If it's the former, then "deaths per combatant per month" is what we want. That would be interesting, though I question how broadly useful it would be. It would obviously be directly useful for combatants (or those considering becoming combatants) but is probably not useful as an overall indicator of "hey, how's the human race doing in general?" If it's the latter, the stat we probably want is "war-related deaths per human being per month" or something like that. That would be a good indicator of overall levels of war and strife. It would take into account the increased population of the world as well. Even if (heaven forbid) we had a conflict that results in WWII-like absolute levels of deaths today, that would represent a far lower number of deaths as a percentage of the human population lost.

Schwolop 6y ago

Those numbers are fascinating in their own right, but even more so when compared against the staggering 35,000+ deaths per month the US is suffering right now. (467k over ~13 months of pandemic, obviously it's not evenly spread but the point is it's an order of magnitude greater than the worst ever war death rates.)

mannykannot 6y ago

You make a very valid point about casualty rates, though I am just about certain that Jim Lovell would have been eager to go regardless. Getting back to casualty rates, I think you have to at least put them on a log scale to get a feel for their impact on society, at least as long as they are less than the survivorship rate.

rjsw 6y ago

The risk isn't just from being a test pilot, there is a line in "The Right Stuff" pointing out that the chances of a Navy pilot being killed in peacetime was 1 in 4 over their career.