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I’ve been watching a lot of Mentour Pilot on YT lately. I’d never considered it before but he goes into a level of depth in his incident breakdowns to referenc

I’ve been watching a lot of Mentour Pilot on YT lately. I’d never considered it before but he goes into a level of depth in his incident breakdowns to reference the aircraft maintenance log, etc. Perhaps unsurprisingly there’s always something “wrong” or “broken” on a machine as complex as a modern aircraft. He’ll often say “Oh this wasn’t working, this was broken, etc but that’s fine and it had nothing to do with this”. There was a story recently where someone tweeted about a Delta aircraft with chipped paint, expressing alarm. While it’s good to be proactive (especially in light of recent incidents) you’d never hesitate to drive a car with chipped paint…

wkat4242 3y ago
You can stop a car when paint chips clog your air intake and clean it out. A bit more difficult to do if you're at 30.000 feet and 400 knots over the middle of the ocean. That's one of the reasons we take issues with airplanes much more seriously.
- kkielhofner 3y ago
  Come on... How many times has that happened on a car? It has to be an exceedingly small number if it has ever happened. I wonder how much of the paint would have to chip off to clog an air filter to the point of interfering with operation. Let alone an aircraft where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience as part of the certification process. Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009. Alaska/Boeing/etc got lucky that there wasn't anyone seated in the two adjacent seats but even then two deaths in 14 years would be an extremely impressive record, and there's no way to know if it would have resulted in death anyway. A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe, just maybe, we should consider that tens of billions of people-flights (made up a metric) have taken place over the past 14 years without a single fatality so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously. You can put that safety record up against anything and it comes out ahead by an extremely wide margin. 250k people in the US die every year from medical errors, as one example.
  - altairprime 3y ago
    A single car incident threatens a handful of lives. An airplane incident threatens a hundred times that, and on top of that, flying is suspicious and fearful to much of humanity to this day. Humans are superstitious, and so paint chips on a plane matter far more to passengers than paint chips on a car. Whether that’s sensible or not is an interesting discussion, but from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s a real and serious concern in airline travel.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      That's not the only reason though, like I said issues in the air are a big problem. Because you can't just stop and get out. Even on a small airplane with only 2 seats maintenance is regulated a lot more than on cars (you can't use parts without the whole certification trail) and accidents are investigated very thorougly. At least here in Europe, not sure about US.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    > Let alone an aircraft where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience as part of the certification process. Yes turkeys but not paint chips. Remember when engines were catching ashes from the Iceland eruption that started to glassify inside the combustion chamber? What happens with accumulated remains of paint chips, we just don't know. Because that's not something that's tested for. It'll have to be a lot of them to matter I'm sure, but some planes are pretty crazily chipping like the A350 was in Qatar. But the paint chips were just an example. A plane was brought down just by hosing it down with water before takeoff a little bit too close: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/painted-into-a-corner-the-crash-of-xl-airways-germany-flight-888t-04257538ac3b https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/painted-into-a-corner-th... > Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009. The 737MAX disasters were a matter of time. It was pure chance that they didn't happen in the US. The US is not safer here, just luckier. Despite Boeing trying to spin it on "those careless foreign operators". In fact the reason MCAS was hidden so much was the insistence of American operators that no new training should be necessary. > A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe, I do trust the authorities, as long as they don't delegate trust to the industry. Because I don't trust the industry. > so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously. Did you really not follow what Boeing did with MCAS? The first accident was perhaps an oversight, perhaps they really didn't realise what could happen when a sensor failure brought MCAS to pitch down constantly. Not revealing this clearly which would have prevented the second crash was pretty criminal in my opinion.

wkat4242 3y ago

You can stop a car when paint chips clog your air intake and clean it out. A bit more difficult to do if you're at 30.000 feet and 400 knots over the middle of the ocean. That's one of the reasons we take issues with airplanes much more seriously.

kkielhofner 3y ago
Come on... How many times has that happened on a car? It has to be an exceedingly small number if it has ever happened. I wonder how much of the paint would have to chip off to clog an air filter to the point of interfering with operation. Let alone an aircraft where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience as part of the certification process. Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009. Alaska/Boeing/etc got lucky that there wasn't anyone seated in the two adjacent seats but even then two deaths in 14 years would be an extremely impressive record, and there's no way to know if it would have resulted in death anyway. A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe, just maybe, we should consider that tens of billions of people-flights (made up a metric) have taken place over the past 14 years without a single fatality so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously. You can put that safety record up against anything and it comes out ahead by an extremely wide margin. 250k people in the US die every year from medical errors, as one example.
- altairprime 3y ago
  A single car incident threatens a handful of lives. An airplane incident threatens a hundred times that, and on top of that, flying is suspicious and fearful to much of humanity to this day. Humans are superstitious, and so paint chips on a plane matter far more to passengers than paint chips on a car. Whether that’s sensible or not is an interesting discussion, but from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s a real and serious concern in airline travel.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    That's not the only reason though, like I said issues in the air are a big problem. Because you can't just stop and get out. Even on a small airplane with only 2 seats maintenance is regulated a lot more than on cars (you can't use parts without the whole certification trail) and accidents are investigated very thorougly. At least here in Europe, not sure about US.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > Let alone an aircraft where they literally shoot frozen turkeys from cannons into engines to test for bird strike resilience as part of the certification process. Yes turkeys but not paint chips. Remember when engines were catching ashes from the Iceland eruption that started to glassify inside the combustion chamber? What happens with accumulated remains of paint chips, we just don't know. Because that's not something that's tested for. It'll have to be a lot of them to matter I'm sure, but some planes are pretty crazily chipping like the A350 was in Qatar. But the paint chips were just an example. A plane was brought down just by hosing it down with water before takeoff a little bit too close: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/painted-into-a-corner-the-crash-of-xl-airways-germany-flight-888t-04257538ac3b https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/painted-into-a-corner-th... > Point is these recent events are unacceptable but the fact remains there hasn't been a single commercial aviation fatality in the US since 2009. The 737MAX disasters were a matter of time. It was pure chance that they didn't happen in the US. The US is not safer here, just luckier. Despite Boeing trying to spin it on "those careless foreign operators". In fact the reason MCAS was hidden so much was the insistence of American operators that no new training should be necessary. > A lot of these aviation threads turn into "peak HN" (like this exchange). I don't blindly trust authorities but maybe, I do trust the authorities, as long as they don't delegate trust to the industry. Because I don't trust the industry. > so the industry clearly knows what they're doing and takes safety seriously. Did you really not follow what Boeing did with MCAS? The first accident was perhaps an oversight, perhaps they really didn't realise what could happen when a sensor failure brought MCAS to pitch down constantly. Not revealing this clearly which would have prevented the second crash was pretty criminal in my opinion.