8 ms·

Things like this are always alarming until you learn the base rate. Unfortunately, I cannot find a quick reference for this, but many many flights take off with

by csours 3y ago

Things like this are always alarming until you learn the base rate. Unfortunately, I cannot find a quick reference for this, but many many flights take off with some anomaly noted in the technical log book.

thfuran 3y ago
And it's not like driving is especially safe. It's just that traffic deaths are so routine that they're not generally widely reported, while pretty much every major issue with an airplane gets national attention. In the US, traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 lost with all hands every couple days.
- laweijfmvo 3y ago
  Whether it’s true or not, I feel like I control my fate when driving a lot more than when flying. I can take precautions (defensive driving, avoiding bad conditions, etc.) but have little to no control once I board a plane.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    When someone runs a red light at speed and t-bones you on your left you're dead no matter how defensively you drive. The illusion of control doesn't change your odds much.
    - vc8f6vVV 3y ago
      It does change odds. So when considering defensive driving the rule "flying is safer" may not hold.
      - peter422 3y ago
        There is no amount of defensive driving you can do that would make driving safer than flying commercial.
        mitthrowaway2 3y ago
        That's certainly true in the sense that flying from NYC to LA is 750x safer than doing the same as a road trip, on a fatalities-per-km basis. But on a per-trip basis, boarding that flight will be about equally as safe as taking a 5 km trip by car to the hardware store, and above-average defensive driving can certainly boost that radius considerably, maybe to 50 km. Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite. On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.
      - cedilla 3y ago
        Flying is safer by several orders of magnitude. Especially in the US.
        vc8f6vVV 3y ago
        Let's do some math, shall we? > In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regularly? Let's assume 2 hours a day for 52x5 = 260 working days in a year. So given that we have 43K traffic fatalities per year let's compute fatalities per hour of driving. 100M * 2 * 260 / 43K = 1.2M So we have 1 fatality per 1.2M hours of driving. At the same time we have roughly 1 fatality per 100K hours of flying. Oops! Of course one should consider that: (a) it's 2007 data, it's probably lower now (10 times lower?), (b) we definitely cover longer distances per hour of flying (by the way not that much, 60 mph vs 600 mph is within 10x difference), (c) it's probably all flying, including private, but I'm not considering just public buses either. Add defensive driving though, and it's not that obvious which is safer.
        hunter2_ 3y ago
        IMHO the comparison is to inform the decision point of whether to fly or drive somewhere, so the inputs should be limited accordingly: exclude drives that couldn't reasonably be flown. Is it safer on average to do a long road trip, or fly? Historical crash data on long road trips (excluding commutes, local errands, etc.) probably doesn't exist, but if it did, that would be very preferable. Perhaps people crash more when driving unfamiliar roads, with additional fatigue of long durations, with additional distraction of kids, etc. Or perhaps routine drives are worse because one lets their guard down!
        vc8f6vVV 3y ago
        Statistics is a tricky thing. There are 43K traffic fatalities in the US per year and 53K deaths from colorectal cancer. Which means chances of dying from colorectal cancer is higher than dying in a traffic accident. Well, over a lifetime, but distribution over age can be different etc. In the same way 43K fatalities are not an even distribution over region, type of driving, destination, age etc. Of course I have to admit that flying commercial airlines is safer by average numbers, in the US and for now. But if we estimate total flying hours as 1.3B/year (http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Documents/Aircraft%20and%20Related/Total%20Fleet/Total%20Aircraft%20Airborne%20Hours%20-%20ALL%20AIRCRAFT.htm http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Docum... times 100 passengers per aircraft) it only takes 1300 deaths per year to make it even with average traffic fatalities. If that flight had been unlucky enough to go down we would have had 177 deaths, already not "orders of magnitude safer" than driving. And the trend is not good. But again, we are comparing apples to oranges. Driving is a very different experience, both long and short trips. Nobody chooses to drive from Boston to LA just out of fear of flying (well, maybe there are exceptions, but "nobody" is still a very accurate word). As for short trips, changes of getting into an accident in urban area driving to the airport is probably higher than driving in the other direction towards your destination. Again, it depends.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      Even then, that is a scenario that you can train to look for. I often look both ways before taking off on a green.
  - mertd 3y ago
    I only feel like I control slightly more than 50% of the situation with defensive driving. There's very little you can do for example if someone decides to rear end you.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      Especially since, most of the time, they weren't intending to rear end you and therefore may be going far too fast to reasonably slow down in time. In my town of 1200 we had a death recently where a driver (no seatbelt) was speeding through a 45 MPH road and somehow didn't see the loaded dump truck stopped to turn left at a construction site. Full speed contact, his vehicle veers to the right and into the ditch. He was either killed instantly or when he hit the ditch.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    It is true that you control your fate more when driving. Once the door shuts on the plane you have little ability to do anything other than get yourself arrested. That’s part of WHY air travel is safer.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      I like to consider what is safer when something goes wromg. Are there statistics that track this across different modes of travel?
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        Your car won't fall out of the sky in the event of a malfunction so I guess cars are safer "when something goes wrong"? Then again cars travel with less margin of error to other cars and objects than airplanes.
        thfuran 3y ago
        An airplane falling out the sky is something like the equivalent of the wheels falling off of a car traveling at speed. It's not that it can't happen, but it's hardly the only possible result of a malfunction.
        cereal_cable 3y ago
        There's also a giant speed difference plus the fact that a car will decelerate even if uncontrollably for basically any mechanical failure. Even at speed vehicle accidents are quite safe comparatively to a plane that has lost its ability to fly. A plane tends to have all or nothing incidents while vehicles have lots of accidents with a wide variety of severity. Naturally that tends to push aviation towards avoidance of mechanical issues and on cars we are much more tolerant. I've seen people driving cars with their door duck taped on!
      - TylerE 3y ago
        Yes. Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars. There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
- shriek 3y ago
  Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash. There's still a chance of you getting ambulance on road accidents but you're plummeting to your death on major aircraft malfunction.
  - StimDeck 3y ago
    [dead]
  - mulmen 3y ago
    > Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash. It isn't though. Airliners have suffered in-flight engine explosions and decompressions multiple times since 2001 without fatalities. The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. Modern airliners don't just fall out of the sky. They feature robust designs and highly competent crews. Cars regularly crash fatally without mechanical failures at all. And that says nothing of the dire state of car maintenance among the general population.
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      > The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. While I agree with your point, if the scope is scheduled airline flights in the USA, AA flight 587 crashed on 2001-11-12; globally, Egypt Air 804 on 2016-05-19. There have also been a few close calls, such as Qantas 32 on 2010-11-04, and collisions can also occur, such as that between BAL flight 2937 and DHL slight 611 on 2002-07-01, and Gol Transportes Aéreos flight 1907 with a business jet on 2006-09-29. And, given the topic is things going catastrophically wrong at altitude, there is AF447 on 2009-06-01.
      - nativeit 3y ago
        Now do a similar list with every road fatality following mechanical problems. We’ll wait.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  A death every 100 million miles driven in the US. That's pretty safe.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Not compared to flying.
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      True, but it's not an apples-to-apple comparison. If you compare by miles, then flying wins by a lot. If you compare by hour, it's much closer (though I'm pretty sure flying still wins, yes).
      - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
        Only commercial. If you add in General Aviation with some random poorly maintained Cessnas from the 70s piloted by some randoms in their 70s then it's a completely different picture.
        mcmoor 3y ago
        I've heard that private aviation and private driving have comparable accident rate, which makes sense. Now I wonder how's the rate of both public transportation.
        pi-e-sigma 3y ago
        According to this chart https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... buses and trains have 0.02 to 0.04 deaths per 100,000,000 miles travelled. This compares to 0.01 deaths in the commercial aviation. So pretty much on par, but if you switched to deaths per hours of travel, which is IMHO better statistic, assuming that a average plane flights say 10 times faster than a bus/train (800km/h vs 80km/h which seems reasonable) then the commercial aviation is actually less safe, but not by a big margin either, within the same order of magnitude.
- turquoisevar 3y ago
  While I think it’s good to keep things in perspective and recognize that statistically you’re more likely to die on the ride to the airport than on the plane itself, it needs to be said that these statistics shouldn’t lead to a complacent mindset especially because the redundancies in aviation can lead to such a mindset. Slowly but surely we see more cutting corners in aviation, especially in the US. This ranges from trying to evade certification for planes to crew hours, to more lax regulation on how air traffic is managed to increase movements at airports, to overworked and understaffed ATC. I don’t think it has risen to levels that affect statistics in terms of death, but the statistics in terms of near catastrophic events has risen over the years.
MadnessASAP 3y ago
I can't link you an independent source just my word as an aircraft mechanic. I have never seen a 100% serviceable aircraft, as far as I'm concerned a aircraft where everything works to spec and the spec works to needs is a myth that we strive for but can never achieve.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  Given the number of parts on one, it would be impossible for them all to be working perfectly at once.
- Exuma 3y ago
  Got any undercover advice for Airlines or plane models to avoid? When you book at ticket is there anything you just won't fly knowing what you know?
  - habinero 3y ago
    Commercial aviation is ridiculously safe and well-regulated. Worry about the ride to the airport instead. You're far more likely to die in a private plane or in an executive jet. GA aircraft crash constantly.
    - cf1241290841 3y ago
      Providing an negative economic incentive for bad actors is still a good idea.
      - habinero 3y ago
        We already have laws for when people are criminally negligent. You want people incentivized to participate in safety culture, not motivated to frame others or destroy evidence to save their jobs. People will always make mistakes and have poor judgment sometimes. That will never go away, and punishing people will not stop it. A robust safety culture expects this to happen, and builds in mechanisms to catch problems.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Yes, it's actually an FAA approved document for each aircraft type called the Mimimum Equipment List (MEL). It defines which non-critical equipment is permitted to be inoperative and not prevent dispatch of the aircraft. Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There are many systems that have redundant backups or are not essential for safe flight.
- pc86 3y ago
  There's a joke about asking skydivers why they'd jump out of a perfectly good airplane and the punch line is that there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane. Every single plane has things that are broken, things that are inoperative, things that behave slightly out of tolerance. This is true for commercial aircraft the whole way down to single engine trainers. 172s are notorious for having fuel gauges that are basically only good for telling you how many fuel tanks you have and not anything related to quantity of fuel on the plane.

by csours 3y ago

thfuran 3y ago

And it's not like driving is especially safe. It's just that traffic deaths are so routine that they're not generally widely reported, while pretty much every major issue with an airplane gets national attention. In the US, traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 lost with all hands every couple days.

laweijfmvo 3y ago
Whether it’s true or not, I feel like I control my fate when driving a lot more than when flying. I can take precautions (defensive driving, avoiding bad conditions, etc.) but have little to no control once I board a plane.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  When someone runs a red light at speed and t-bones you on your left you're dead no matter how defensively you drive. The illusion of control doesn't change your odds much.
  - vc8f6vVV 3y ago
    It does change odds. So when considering defensive driving the rule "flying is safer" may not hold.
    - peter422 3y ago
      There is no amount of defensive driving you can do that would make driving safer than flying commercial.
      - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
        That's certainly true in the sense that flying from NYC to LA is 750x safer than doing the same as a road trip, on a fatalities-per-km basis. But on a per-trip basis, boarding that flight will be about equally as safe as taking a 5 km trip by car to the hardware store, and above-average defensive driving can certainly boost that radius considerably, maybe to 50 km. Some would argue the per-trip comparison is invalid, but often the travel distance is not fixed, such as if you were weighing between vacation options of flying to NYC vs camping at a local campsite. On a danger-per-hour-in-vehicle basis, airplanes of course still come out ahead, although not quite as overwhelmingly. NYC to LA is about a 5.5 hour flight; an equivalent drive would be about 350 km, and it will be very hard to match the safety of that flight even with defensive driving. You'd need to drive 70x better than average, even with the fatigue of a 5.5 hour drive.
    - cedilla 3y ago
      Flying is safer by several orders of magnitude. Especially in the US.
      - vc8f6vVV 3y ago
        Let's do some math, shall we? > In 2007, the National Transportation Safety Board estimated a total of nearly 24 million flight hours. Of these 24 million hours, 6.84 of every 100,000 flight hours yielded an airplane crash, and 1.19 of every 100,000 yielded a fatal crash. https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html https://www.psbr.law/aviation_accident_statistics.html So we have 330M people in the US, of which let's say 100M are driving regularly. How regularly? Let's assume 2 hours a day for 52x5 = 260 working days in a year. So given that we have 43K traffic fatalities per year let's compute fatalities per hour of driving. 100M * 2 * 260 / 43K = 1.2M So we have 1 fatality per 1.2M hours of driving. At the same time we have roughly 1 fatality per 100K hours of flying. Oops! Of course one should consider that: (a) it's 2007 data, it's probably lower now (10 times lower?), (b) we definitely cover longer distances per hour of flying (by the way not that much, 60 mph vs 600 mph is within 10x difference), (c) it's probably all flying, including private, but I'm not considering just public buses either. Add defensive driving though, and it's not that obvious which is safer.
        hunter2_ 3y ago
        IMHO the comparison is to inform the decision point of whether to fly or drive somewhere, so the inputs should be limited accordingly: exclude drives that couldn't reasonably be flown. Is it safer on average to do a long road trip, or fly? Historical crash data on long road trips (excluding commutes, local errands, etc.) probably doesn't exist, but if it did, that would be very preferable. Perhaps people crash more when driving unfamiliar roads, with additional fatigue of long durations, with additional distraction of kids, etc. Or perhaps routine drives are worse because one lets their guard down!
        vc8f6vVV 3y ago
        Statistics is a tricky thing. There are 43K traffic fatalities in the US per year and 53K deaths from colorectal cancer. Which means chances of dying from colorectal cancer is higher than dying in a traffic accident. Well, over a lifetime, but distribution over age can be different etc. In the same way 43K fatalities are not an even distribution over region, type of driving, destination, age etc. Of course I have to admit that flying commercial airlines is safer by average numbers, in the US and for now. But if we estimate total flying hours as 1.3B/year (http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Documents/Aircraft%20and%20Related/Total%20Fleet/Total%20Aircraft%20Airborne%20Hours%20-%20ALL%20AIRCRAFT.htm http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2018%2012%20Month%20Docum... times 100 passengers per aircraft) it only takes 1300 deaths per year to make it even with average traffic fatalities. If that flight had been unlucky enough to go down we would have had 177 deaths, already not "orders of magnitude safer" than driving. And the trend is not good. But again, we are comparing apples to oranges. Driving is a very different experience, both long and short trips. Nobody chooses to drive from Boston to LA just out of fear of flying (well, maybe there are exceptions, but "nobody" is still a very accurate word). As for short trips, changes of getting into an accident in urban area driving to the airport is probably higher than driving in the other direction towards your destination. Again, it depends.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    Even then, that is a scenario that you can train to look for. I often look both ways before taking off on a green.
- mertd 3y ago
  I only feel like I control slightly more than 50% of the situation with defensive driving. There's very little you can do for example if someone decides to rear end you.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Especially since, most of the time, they weren't intending to rear end you and therefore may be going far too fast to reasonably slow down in time. In my town of 1200 we had a death recently where a driver (no seatbelt) was speeding through a 45 MPH road and somehow didn't see the loaded dump truck stopped to turn left at a construction site. Full speed contact, his vehicle veers to the right and into the ditch. He was either killed instantly or when he hit the ditch.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  It is true that you control your fate more when driving. Once the door shuts on the plane you have little ability to do anything other than get yourself arrested. That’s part of WHY air travel is safer.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    I like to consider what is safer when something goes wromg. Are there statistics that track this across different modes of travel?
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Your car won't fall out of the sky in the event of a malfunction so I guess cars are safer "when something goes wrong"? Then again cars travel with less margin of error to other cars and objects than airplanes.
      - thfuran 3y ago
        An airplane falling out the sky is something like the equivalent of the wheels falling off of a car traveling at speed. It's not that it can't happen, but it's hardly the only possible result of a malfunction.
        cereal_cable 3y ago
        There's also a giant speed difference plus the fact that a car will decelerate even if uncontrollably for basically any mechanical failure. Even at speed vehicle accidents are quite safe comparatively to a plane that has lost its ability to fly. A plane tends to have all or nothing incidents while vehicles have lots of accidents with a wide variety of severity. Naturally that tends to push aviation towards avoidance of mechanical issues and on cars we are much more tolerant. I've seen people driving cars with their door duck taped on!
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Yes. Airplanes are literally hundreds of times less likely to kill you per mile than cars. There has not been a single US airline fatality since 2009.
shriek 3y ago
Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash. There's still a chance of you getting ambulance on road accidents but you're plummeting to your death on major aircraft malfunction.
- StimDeck 3y ago
  [dead]
- mulmen 3y ago
  > Because the chance of you dying when something goes wrong in an aircraft at high altitude is significantly higher (almost 100%) than you dying in a car crash. It isn't though. Airliners have suffered in-flight engine explosions and decompressions multiple times since 2001 without fatalities. The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. Modern airliners don't just fall out of the sky. They feature robust designs and highly competent crews. Cars regularly crash fatally without mechanical failures at all. And that says nothing of the dire state of car maintenance among the general population.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    > The last time a structural failure of an aircraft resulted in a crash was in 2000 and it was a design that entered service in 1959. While I agree with your point, if the scope is scheduled airline flights in the USA, AA flight 587 crashed on 2001-11-12; globally, Egypt Air 804 on 2016-05-19. There have also been a few close calls, such as Qantas 32 on 2010-11-04, and collisions can also occur, such as that between BAL flight 2937 and DHL slight 611 on 2002-07-01, and Gol Transportes Aéreos flight 1907 with a business jet on 2006-09-29. And, given the topic is things going catastrophically wrong at altitude, there is AF447 on 2009-06-01.
    - nativeit 3y ago
      Now do a similar list with every road fatality following mechanical problems. We’ll wait.
bcrosby95 3y ago
A death every 100 million miles driven in the US. That's pretty safe.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Not compared to flying.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    True, but it's not an apples-to-apple comparison. If you compare by miles, then flying wins by a lot. If you compare by hour, it's much closer (though I'm pretty sure flying still wins, yes).
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      Only commercial. If you add in General Aviation with some random poorly maintained Cessnas from the 70s piloted by some randoms in their 70s then it's a completely different picture.
      - mcmoor 3y ago
        I've heard that private aviation and private driving have comparable accident rate, which makes sense. Now I wonder how's the rate of both public transportation.
        pi-e-sigma 3y ago
        According to this chart https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... buses and trains have 0.02 to 0.04 deaths per 100,000,000 miles travelled. This compares to 0.01 deaths in the commercial aviation. So pretty much on par, but if you switched to deaths per hours of travel, which is IMHO better statistic, assuming that a average plane flights say 10 times faster than a bus/train (800km/h vs 80km/h which seems reasonable) then the commercial aviation is actually less safe, but not by a big margin either, within the same order of magnitude.
turquoisevar 3y ago
While I think it’s good to keep things in perspective and recognize that statistically you’re more likely to die on the ride to the airport than on the plane itself, it needs to be said that these statistics shouldn’t lead to a complacent mindset especially because the redundancies in aviation can lead to such a mindset. Slowly but surely we see more cutting corners in aviation, especially in the US. This ranges from trying to evade certification for planes to crew hours, to more lax regulation on how air traffic is managed to increase movements at airports, to overworked and understaffed ATC. I don’t think it has risen to levels that affect statistics in terms of death, but the statistics in terms of near catastrophic events has risen over the years.

MadnessASAP 3y ago

I can't link you an independent source just my word as an aircraft mechanic. I have never seen a 100% serviceable aircraft, as far as I'm concerned a aircraft where everything works to spec and the spec works to needs is a myth that we strive for but can never achieve.

mattmaroon 3y ago
Given the number of parts on one, it would be impossible for them all to be working perfectly at once.
Exuma 3y ago
Got any undercover advice for Airlines or plane models to avoid? When you book at ticket is there anything you just won't fly knowing what you know?
- habinero 3y ago
  Commercial aviation is ridiculously safe and well-regulated. Worry about the ride to the airport instead. You're far more likely to die in a private plane or in an executive jet. GA aircraft crash constantly.
  - cf1241290841 3y ago
    Providing an negative economic incentive for bad actors is still a good idea.
    - habinero 3y ago
      We already have laws for when people are criminally negligent. You want people incentivized to participate in safety culture, not motivated to frame others or destroy evidence to save their jobs. People will always make mistakes and have poor judgment sometimes. That will never go away, and punishing people will not stop it. A robust safety culture expects this to happen, and builds in mechanisms to catch problems.

SoftTalker 3y ago

Yes, it's actually an FAA approved document for each aircraft type called the Mimimum Equipment List (MEL). It defines which non-critical equipment is permitted to be inoperative and not prevent dispatch of the aircraft. Commercial aviation would come to a halt if every aircraft had to be in 100% perfect condition for every flight. There are many systems that have redundant backups or are not essential for safe flight.

pc86 3y ago
There's a joke about asking skydivers why they'd jump out of a perfectly good airplane and the punch line is that there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane. Every single plane has things that are broken, things that are inoperative, things that behave slightly out of tolerance. This is true for commercial aircraft the whole way down to single engine trainers. 172s are notorious for having fuel gauges that are basically only good for telling you how many fuel tanks you have and not anything related to quantity of fuel on the plane.