6 ms·
Why are the lights expensive?
by KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
Why are the lights expensive?
- Dalewyn 4y agoManufacturing certifications, installation and maintenance inspections and certifications, auditing, etc. To put it into some relatable context, a simple electrical switch that you might grab for a few bucks at your local Home Depot would cost at least several hundreds of dollars because of all the red tape that must be satisfied for safety reasons. Safety isn't cheap.
- ars 4y agoThe extra cost for safety is reducing safety because it's causing this not to get installed. Maybe it's worth having a worse system that actually is there.
- jahewson 4y agoUnreliable systems aren’t there when you need them.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zmgsabst 4y agoNeither are nonexistent systems.
- Dalewyn 4y agoThere is a psychological element to it. If there's a safety mechanism that may or may not work, coming to rely on it is suicidal. If there is no safety mechanism in the first place, you (hopefully!) never become complacent in the first place. So it's better to either have a safety mechanism that will absolutely work every single time or nothing at all, than one that may or may not work and invite complacency.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoImagine you are doing barrel roll and struggling to control a plane, and you have a parachute. So you decide, scre the airplane, a will save my life, and jump out. Only it fails to open, it was an unreliable parachite, bought by someone like you. They thought,'better a 50/50 parachite then no parachute? So now you are plummeting to you death, thinking, that if you did not have the confidence of 'I have a parachute' you woupd have never attemped the barrel roll in the first place. And you would have done your utmost to steady the plane, and probably would succeed. And you would not waste time packing it and fuel carrying it around with you.
- zmgsabst 4y agoWhy would you do a barrel roll in a plane full of passengers, when you’re being paid to operate it safely? Your entire hypothetical is unlike the actual scenario, where this is being recommended. Of course you have different solutions to a completely different problem — but what you haven’t addressed is why this is a bad solution to this particular problem.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agonono, imagine you have a personal 1 seater plane The presence of a backup option affects your decision making. Human brain assumes the backup is reliable. If you install some 50/50 backup, you put more people at risk
- zmgsabst 4y agoRight — that situation is completely unlike the actual one. Different situations reasonably have different constraints. Why is imagining something completely different useful?
- gregmac 4y agoIf this system fails when needed, every cent spent on it will be considered a waste. Nobody is going to say "sure, 300 people died and a couple $150m planes were destroyed.. but we saved a couple million dollars when it was installed 7 years ago".
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoIt would be ideologically convenient for you if people died but statistically it's just gonna be another close call since close calls outnumber accidents in this field by a ton to one. If/when it happens the professionals who deal in this stuff will say something mundane like "this system prevented ten close calls before we actually had one slip through, that's pretty great". And they'll replace the $5 lightbulb and move the "check the bulbs" from the monthly maintenance checklist to the weekly checklist. And you'll complain much like you're complaining now.
- bumby 4y ago>close calls outnumber accidents in this field by a ton to one The irony is that the reason the safety numbers are that good is because aerospace is one of the only 5+ sigma quality/safety industries.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoAll industries have close calls outnumbering real accidents by a ton. The fact that the absolute numbers are low does not change any calculations that follow from that ratio.
- bumby 4y agoLook at the history of aviation before it was a 5-sigma industry. The safety record was much worse. If your point is that close calls will always outnumber the actual accidents, that’s like saying the number of doctor visits will outnumber the number of cancer diagnoses. Safety incidents are always a subset of a larger set that also contains close calls. By their nature, most safety incidents require multiple things to go wrong, which means there will be more times that some, but not all, things will go wrong to create a close call. It’s almost such a trivial point that it’s hardly salient enough to mention.
- Spooky23 4y agoEasy to preach, harder to practice. When I was an intern I got to help change the blinking red light on top of a 50 story building. It’s a big deal that was scheduled weeks in advance and probably involved two dozen people, a special lightbulb and a bunch of coordination. Even among the team working it plenty of “how many X does it take to change a light bulb” jokes were told. But consider than a pilot depends on certain things being there when things go wrong. If the weather is bad and there’s issues with instruments, seeing that red light is the difference between life and death. There are potentially dozens or hundreds of people on a plane and if I recall correctly up to 4,000 people in the building. When life is at risk, the standard for engineering must be higher.
- CamperBob2 4y agoWhat would be better for safety? One $10000 light bulb, or ten $10 light bulbs?
- nerdponx 4y agoThe former, if the latter fails to satisfy some design constraint.
- icehawk 4y agoHow much more/less often do those ten $10 light bulbs go out? How did you prove that? If its more often, does an outage need to be detected? How do you detect that lightbulb went out? How much does that cost?
- labster 4y agoCompared to the cost of an air incident, $9900 is a rounding error. You’d need an actuary to know for sure, but even small differences in safety margin can be worth the cost in aviation.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> Compared to the cost of an air incident, $9900 is a rounding error. Doesn't matter; that's not a comparison that's relevant to any decision here. How many additional crashes per year are prevented by the high-cost bulbs, and how many additional dollars per year does it cost to install them on every building? Maybe the 10 $10 light bulbs need to be replaced once a year and they cost $150 / year. Maybe the one $10,000 bulb needs to be replaced every 15 years and costs $900 / year. Once you've gotten to that point, at least you know what the cost difference is. Then you can either ask "how many planes would crash into the Chrysler building every year if it was using 10 bulbs from Home Depot, compared to the one bulb it's currently using?", and compare that to $750. In that case you'd get an answer that told you whether the Chrysler building should use a special bulb. Or you could ask "how many planes would crash into buildings anywhere in the world every year if they all used 10 bulbs from Home Depot instead of what they currently use?", compare that to $750 multiplied by the number of tall buildings in the world, and you'd get an answer that would tell you whether it'd be better for every building in the world to use commodity bulbs or for all of them to use the bespoke bulbs. But you'd never ask "which costs more, one fancy lightbulb or one crashing plane?". That won't tell you anything.
- fragmede 4y agoRed tape isn't the phrase I'd use in this context since your point is that the switch will work 100% of the time even after being thru a literal hurricane, so the difference isn't merely the tape, but that there's been proper testing and engineering all the way down, which drives the cost way up.
- Dalewyn 4y agoI admit my vocabulary is failing me at the moment in finding similarly concise words to describe it, but I'm happy if the meaning gets through one way or another.
- fragmede 4y agoone way to phrase it might be to change > because of all the red tape that must be to because of all the rigoy testing and precise engineering that has to be
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoEvery strip of BS red adhesive has some flimsy pretext to justify it. Nobody is saying you can't pour theoretically meaningful pork into a traffic light in the form of QA and whatnot and get an indestructible traffic light that operates for a century without being touched in return. People are questioning whether that's actually necessary for a system that's already the Nth layer of redundancy.
- bumby 4y agoI don't know how airport infrastructure requirements work, but for the actual airframes themselves, the requisite level of reliability/redundancy are strictly defined. I would imagine airport design is similar. If so, it's clear if it's necessary or not.
- Dalewyn 4y agoI realize reading this now that "red tape" was not the appropriate way to convey what I'm trying to convey. I'm going to try and figure out how to rephrase that better in the future. All those inspections, certifications, and other requirements exist for very good reasons. Reasons that more likely than not cost us blood and tears to realize their need.
- KyeRussell 4y agoJust assume that whenever something involves a plane it costs at least an order of magnitude more :). Nothing on a runway is cheap.
- sonofhans 4y agoI don't think the other answers are getting at the meat of it. Consider that those red lights functioning is the only thing keeping hundreds or thousands of people from getting killed. What sorts of safety and durability requirements would you impose on them? What sorts of maintenance and training requirements? If nothing else they need to hold up in every weather and temperature big airports exist (-80ºF to +150ºF) and get run over by airplanes all day. Already that's a non-trivial problem.
- sokoloff 4y agoThese lights would not be the only thing keeping hundreds from being killed. ATC clearances over the radio are the primary thing; this is a secondary system.
- BoorishBears 4y agoThat's an example of why they're expensive: they need to be engineered as if one day they might be. And no one chooses when or where that is
- tempestn 4y agoThat doesn't seem logical if the alternative is not having the lights at all.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago> That doesn't seem logical if the alternative is not having the lights at all. If the norm becomes (radio clearance and no red lights), I suspect pilots will become conditioned to equate no-red-lights with landing clearance. Not 100%, but maybe at least 1% of the time. So if that happens and the red lights stopped working, you have a problem that wouldn't have existed if the red lights were never introduced. Perhaps a more resilient system would use green lights to indicate landing clearance. Then if the lights failed, the default would be radioing ATC for guidance? (I have no qualifications on this topic. I'm just guessing based on a bunch of Mentour videos I've watched.)
- dehrmann 4y agoI can't imagine they're more expensive than a collision.
- xwdv 4y agoThe lights are a critical system that must operate without failure or errors. You could do it a lot cheaper if you could accept them not working correctly sometimes. Like occasionally all the lights at an intersection would be green or something.