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There are also a hundred or more passengers on a transpacific flight. If planes and humans were equally reliable, we'd expect to see medical diversions to outnu
by JohnBooty 4y ago
There are also a hundred or more passengers on a transpacific flight. If planes and humans were equally reliable, we'd expect to see medical diversions to outnumber mechanical ones by more than 100:1....
- Beltalowda 4y agoAlso depends on whether you had the fish for the in-flight dinner.
- elromulous 4y agoUnderrated comment right here.
- nielsbot 4y agoThey serve dinner?
- chrisseaton 4y agoNever been on a plane before? Yeah they serve meals and drinks at your seat.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThat's outrageous. Think of the profit they're giving up for comfortable service.
- bombcar 4y agoThey serve food and drinks mainly to prevent medical related diversions. Fed and watered customers are less likely to get ill and less likely to get unruly.
- withinboredom 4y agoI wish they felt that way about space to move around.
- euroderf 4y agoAnother reason is to keep passengers occupied. Keep'em fiddling with stuff and it keeps them out of the hair of the flight crew. Trying to fit an airline meal into the terribly limited space of an airline tray, and unwrap things that need unwrapping, and keep the trash under control, and find places for the small things they include that you don't even eat or need - and still manage to partake of the comestibles - this requires skills in spatial management that for some may lead to an unrewarding career in solving infernal Chinese wooden puzzles.
- jodrellblank 4y agoSee: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5935/did-removing-one-olive-lead-to-an-airline-saving-thousands-of-dollars https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5935/did-removi... "Apparently there was an airline that managed to save tens of thousands of dollars per year by removing a single olive from the salads in their meals, because it was hardly noticed by customers it was a massive win, tens of thousands of dollars without anyone noticing. How true is this story?"
- bitwrangler 4y agoI think this post is referencing a joke from the movie Airplane! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/
- chasd00 4y agoAh yes, I had lasagna.
- Robotbeat 4y agoThat’s an interesting argument in favor of smaller and faster aircraft (for a given reliability…).
- bee_rider 4y agoBy quite a bit, right? Assuming passenger malfunctions were statistically independent, I guess passenger malfunctions would follow the binomial distribution.
- marshray 4y agoThe probability of any passenger malfunction should be exponential by the number of passengers.
- throwawaytemp27 4y agoDo you mean multiplicative? Or linear? Why would it be exponential?
- dekhn 4y agoI think they mean it's 1 - prob of any person getting sick ** number of people on plane
- marshray 4y agoAny one malfunctioning passenger is sufficient to fail the overall flight. Assume each is independently probable of malfunction. If we know nothing else about the passengers, we can only model them as having some average rate of successful flight without malfunction, say 99.9%. Say there are 100 passengers. We roll the dice 100 times, once for each passenger. The success rate for the overall flight would be 0.999 ^ 100 = 90.4% -> About a 10% chance of flight failure. If there are 400 passengers, we get 67.0%, about a 33% chance of flight failure. Given enough passengers per flight, few or no flights reach their destination.
- TooKool4This 4y agoShouldn't you multiply rather than add IID events?
- uoaei 4y agoRatios are multiplicative.