4 ms·

birthday balloon? In front of a landing plane at 170mph?

• moosedev 3y ago
  GP is (quite reasonably) using a deliberately slightly silly example as a rhetorical flourish. I would do the same. Think of it of a stand-in or totem for all of the possibilities (from silly to very real) that leap into horrifying life in an engineer's brain when they learn that a critical system has a single point of failure.
• neuralRiot 3y ago
  In a safety-critical design you have to take in account what will happen if what cannot happen happens.
• jiggawatts 3y ago
  Yes. It happens. In a recent news clip a pilot was interviewed about the MAX and he raised the risk of bird strike and birthday balloons as something that “happens all the time”.
• uuddlrlrbaba 3y ago
  It actually happens, similarly to bird strikes or collisions with essentially any object that can float or fly into the path of a plane. https://simpleflying.com/avianca-airbus-a319-balloon-strike/ https://simpleflying.com/avianca-airbus-a319-balloon-strike/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-09-22-me-41720-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-09-22-me-41720-... https://dronedj.com/2021/08/31/update-faa-says-envoy-air-passenger-plane-hit-balloon-not-drone/ https://dronedj.com/2021/08/31/update-faa-says-envoy-air-pas...