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Despite headlines, air travel gets safer and safer every year. At least when measured by fatalities per departure. Boeing has had several high profile failures,

by tootie 2y ago

Despite headlines, air travel gets safer and safer every year. At least when measured by fatalities per departure. Boeing has had several high profile failures, but it's correlated with a huge increase in flights and a huge increase in expectations.

wkat4242 2y ago
The problem is more that those failures were entirely preventable and caused by decisions that prioritised economic motives over security. And the manufacturer was squarely to blame, which is also not the case in most accidents. Even when the industry overall is doing pretty well, we should still scrutinize every incident. There's no such thing as acceptable fatalities.
- fjgvcjygjvh 2y ago
  To be fair the airlines possibly share a slight proportion of the blame. They could have made sure that the pilots received proper training (or at least a fraction of it). There might be a reason why both incidents happened in third world countries...
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    No, not really. Because Boeing deliberately withheld information about MCAS from the training. Especially because that would have led to breaking the shared type certificate. It could have happened in a western country just as well. About the second incident it is a bit more debatable as some information was given after the first accident (though very sparse still) but for the first the pilots could not have been aware of the MCAS off-switch that would have solved all their problems. In fact it was a bit nasty that Boeing even tried to play the "poor third-world airline" card for a while even though they knew exactly what had happened.
btmiller 2y ago
Don’t mistake the momentum of past success for current engineering and safety practices. If the MAX and 787 can get released with defects slipping out, there’s little certainty which other corners are being cut that can wipe out all progress of safety in the blink of an eye.
vikramkr 2y ago
We all know air travel is safe. The concern is that the complacency involved with folks just parroting that argument is leading us to a world where that's no longer the case. Air travel isn't safe because of magic, it's safe because of decades of work, strong safety cultures, good regulations, etc. We're seeing Boeing had gutted it's safety culture, the FAA's made questionable safety decisions, overworked air traffic controllers leading to near misses, and so on. Despite the common refrain - the safety of air travel is a marvel of engineering, management, and regulation, not an innate law of the universe. If those pillars start cracking, we need to be clear eyed, take that extremely seriously, and fix it with high urgency

by tootie 2y ago

wkat4242 2y ago

The problem is more that those failures were entirely preventable and caused by decisions that prioritised economic motives over security. And the manufacturer was squarely to blame, which is also not the case in most accidents. Even when the industry overall is doing pretty well, we should still scrutinize every incident. There's no such thing as acceptable fatalities.

fjgvcjygjvh 2y ago
To be fair the airlines possibly share a slight proportion of the blame. They could have made sure that the pilots received proper training (or at least a fraction of it). There might be a reason why both incidents happened in third world countries...
- wkat4242 2y ago
  No, not really. Because Boeing deliberately withheld information about MCAS from the training. Especially because that would have led to breaking the shared type certificate. It could have happened in a western country just as well. About the second incident it is a bit more debatable as some information was given after the first accident (though very sparse still) but for the first the pilots could not have been aware of the MCAS off-switch that would have solved all their problems. In fact it was a bit nasty that Boeing even tried to play the "poor third-world airline" card for a while even though they knew exactly what had happened.

btmiller 2y ago

Don’t mistake the momentum of past success for current engineering and safety practices. If the MAX and 787 can get released with defects slipping out, there’s little certainty which other corners are being cut that can wipe out all progress of safety in the blink of an eye.

vikramkr 2y ago

We all know air travel is safe. The concern is that the complacency involved with folks just parroting that argument is leading us to a world where that's no longer the case. Air travel isn't safe because of magic, it's safe because of decades of work, strong safety cultures, good regulations, etc. We're seeing Boeing had gutted it's safety culture, the FAA's made questionable safety decisions, overworked air traffic controllers leading to near misses, and so on. Despite the common refrain - the safety of air travel is a marvel of engineering, management, and regulation, not an innate law of the universe. If those pillars start cracking, we need to be clear eyed, take that extremely seriously, and fix it with high urgency