7 ms·

US airlines transported passengers over two light-years since the last crash

91 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

formerly_proven 2y ago
> It shows me how hard it is to notice the absence of something. I was not aware that no US airline had crashed in the past 15 years. And I didn’t realize what an incredible safety record this represents, given how many people are boarding flights every day. Pure luck though with the whole Boeing thing. There's no particular reason why those 350-odd dead in two crashes couldn't have happened to an US airline. (It would've been better for aviation safety if it did).
- dotancohen 2y ago
  It's been a while and I don't remember the details, but if I remember correctly US airlines' aircraft were equipped with dual airspeed sensors, or some other sensor. Or both sensors were used as inputs to the MCAS.
  - belter 2y ago
    They always had two, but the disagree alert was the extra. It's still mindblowing when you read again the details, and realize nobody went to prison... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
    - UltraSane 2y ago
      Not only did no one go to prison but Boeing got an incredibly generous deferred prosecution deal that said that if they didn't break the law for two years the government would drop the charges and then Boeing couldn't even do that and then plead guilty. But they only get a pretty tiny $243.6 million fine
  - foldr 2y ago
    I don't think the disagree alert would have helped. Pilots weren't trained on MCAS, so they wouldn't have thought "oh, the AoA sensors disagree, so I'd better switch to manual trim".
    - sofixa 2y ago
      > Pilots weren't trained on MCAS And it wasn't referenced anywhere other than the glossary which explained what the abbreviation meant, so they had no chance.
    - sokoloff 2y ago
      Both MCAS crashes would have been avoided if the crew correctly executed the memory-item runaway stab trim checklist. (The second crew almost saved it by first correctly executing that checklist, then reversing that corrective action while trying to recover, after which point the flight was lost.) That’s what Boeing was counting on (and was terribly wrong in retrospect).
      - foldr 2y ago
        Indeed. I made the same point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42295005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42295005
- berti 2y ago
  Certainly not just down to luck across the industry as a whole though. That particular type was exempt from a bunch of regulations, written in blood, that all the other popular types comply with.
- foldr 2y ago
  I think pilot training is almost certainly a factor. Technically, Boeing are correct that a fully trained and competent 737 pilot should have been able to execute the runaway trim procedure (which is a memory item) and recover the aircraft without incident. However, the fact that two sets of pilots failed to do this in quick succession showed that pilot training could not be relied on to this extent in practice. On average, pilot training ought to be better in the US than in many (not all) other countries.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  > There's no particular reason why those 350-odd dead in two crashes couldn't have happened to an US airline. True, but in practice, not so American pilots had two things for them here: 1) more aware of maintenance needs of speed sensors (and probably better SOPs as well regarding disagreeing sensors) and 2) more experience with flying manually (on older 737s even) and acting correctly if MCAS went haywire
  - jowea 2y ago
    Isn't a big part of the issue for the first incident that pilots didn't know MCAS even existed?
    - raverbashing 2y ago
      Yes, but there existed a procedure for "Runaway Trim" (This showed up in Google but I think the 1st answer, rather than OP is right here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416050 - of course now we have the FAA report)
- sofixa 2y ago
  > Pure luck though with the whole Boeing thing. There's no particular reason why those 350-odd dead in two crashes couldn't have happened to an US airline. (It would've been better for aviation safety if it did). And also the door blowout, in which Boeing employees forgot to put bolts back in, because they sidestepped the system, wasn't a crash only thanks to pure luck. The door could have easily taken parts of the tail with it, potentially severing horizontal/vertical stabilisers, hydraulics, etc. It could have been a very deadly affair.
delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
The number of unit systems in this article is mind-boggling. Just use SI!
- HPsquared 2y ago
  2.3 light years is 2.18E+16 metres (21,759,680,086,934,100 metres or about 22 petametres). Not the easiest figure to comprehend!
- eru 2y ago
  They flew around 2 petametre since the last crash around 0.5 Gigaseconds ago. I guess it's an article both about the US and about airtravel, so they're gonna use freedom units.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  Using light years is perfectly appropriate when talking about trillions of kilometers because 1ly is about 9 trillion km. Should astronomers stop using light years?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Just use SI! Why? Ly, parsecs and AU are intuitively useful in astronomy in a way e.g. Pm are not. They’re also both trivially convertible yet not commonly converted. If anything, quoting in SI because someone’s being dogmatic is more likely to introduce errors as everyone converts to the customary units. (Airplanes aren’t astronomical entities. But the author is making an astronomical analogy.)
55555 2y ago
I once analyzed the numbers and flying isn't actually much safer than driving per trip. The numbers look insanely good because they quote them per mile. Google says 1 death in 6 million trips vs 1 in 8 million, if you ask it twice so it actually does the math correctly.
- wesselbindt 2y ago
  I'm not sure why looking at the incidents per trip would be preferable over looking at the incidents per mile. If I think about comparing two activities when it comes to safety, I feel like I'd want to look at the number of incidents per second of performing either activity. EDIT: here's a thought experiment. You're taking a trip to the grocery store. You have two routes in mind, the direct one, which takes 5 minutes, and the detour via the North Pole, which will take weeks. One of these trips is safer than the other.
  - Qem 2y ago
    > I'm not sure why looking at the incidents per trip would be preferable over looking at the incidents per mile. Personally when enter a vehicle and start a trip, I'm interested in arriving at the destination alive, regardless of distance. If something bad happens, whether I die 1km into it, or 10.000km into, is quite pointless. So incidents per trip probably conform better to how people evaluate travel risks.
    - martylamb 2y ago
      That might be true for most and is a reasonable way of looking at it. But if someone is going on a 10,000km trip and trying to choose between modes of travel, the mode with the fewest incidents per mile will be the safest way.
    - wesselbindt 2y ago
      Exactly, so when I get in that car, I want to know the probability of dying. How do you compute this? By taking the number of crashes per kilometer, and multiplying by the number of kilometers you'll drive for. A trip of 5000km is less safe than a 5km one. That's just common sense. Similarly, when comparing flying versus driving from Amsterdam to Paris, you are, as you say, interested in which method is most likely to get you to your destination alive. So you take the number of incidents per kilometer for planes and cars, and multiply them by the distance between Amsterdam and Paris. The interesting figure really is incidents / kilometer, that's just basic math.
CM30 2y ago
It's also a good example of how public perception and actual stats often differ significantly. If you asked people whether driving or flying were safer, I suspect most would say the former. But statistically speaking, the latter is so much safer it's almost unreal, it's just that the worst case scenarios get a lot more attention there when they do happen. That said, it is worth noting that an increased focus on safety comes with trade offs. If everything was held to aircraft standards of safety, then every project under the sun would also take significantly longer, cost significantly more and probably be less user friendly for the end user. But that doesn't happen, because a less safe system is often 'good enough' for other fields.
- eru 2y ago
  Apart from nuclear power: that's held to even higher safety standards than flying. With exactly the cost overruns and schedule delays you predict.
  - Arnt 2y ago
    I think you mean that nuclear power generators are required to take extremely expensive safety measures when they handle significant amounts of radioactive materials (several thick concrete walls around the nuclear material, regular thorough inspection of the walls, and so on and so forth). Planes are not required to do that. However, it's a bit unfair, because the safety regulations for radioactive materials prohibit air transport of such amounts. You're saying that "handle with extreme care" is a higher safety standard than "doing that is forbidden".
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Apart from nuclear power: that's held to even higher safety standards than flying. And with good reason. Fukushima rendered large amounts of land uninhabitable for years, Chernobyl to this very day impacts fungi and wild pig meat in places as far away as Bavaria - and that's just the two fatal accident scenarios. On top of that come all the other incidents - the cleanup of Sellafield for example will cost > 130 billion pounds [1], a result of decades of negligence. Nuclear power is only financially viable when taxpayers of all the countries surrounding a NPP pick up the bill in the disaster case. Would every NPP be required to obtain actual insurance to account for disasters, it would be among the most expensive ways to generate power. In contrast, the most damage that a runaway airplane can cause is a few thousand deaths, by piloting it into a skyscraper. [1] https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1058944/sellafield-nuclear-waste-dump-costs-surge-to-136bn-leaving-questions-over-value-1058944.html https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1058944/...
rotten 2y ago
The new head of the FAA promises to make flying safe again by getting rid of minority and women pilots.
sofixa 2y ago
> The last time a US airline crashed was on February 12, 2009, in New York State. Fifty people died.1 This is just wrong. Atlas Air Flight 3591 was in 2019, with the loss of 3 souls on board. And it was a regularly scheduled airline flight, just cargo, not passenger. Still an airline crash by a US airline on US soil. Also, Alaska Air 1282 was a very near miss, and it's only pure luck that the door didn't take parts of the tail with it, which could have been catastrophic.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  The denominator is "passenger mile", those don't have passengers. Would be interesting to look into whether cargo flights have higher accident rate than passenger flights.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    If you include all the feeder aircraft routes (lots of single-engine Grand Caravans and the like), it’s much, much worse than US airline passenger flights. Reasons include a mix of equipment, flying on the wrong side of the clock (often by low-time pilots with other jobs), lots of single pilot ops, driving for the lowest possible cost and highest dispatch rate, less oversight (and a little bit more cowboy as a result), and lots of short legs to airports with shorter runways, fewer runways, and often less services (snow removal, ATC, de-icing, etc.)
  - sofixa 2y ago
    Yes, but this is from the introduction of the article. It isn't until the 6th paragraph of the article, after the part I quoted in the 5th one, that they mention anything about passengers. Before that it's all about "(air)plane crashes" and "US airlines", no mention of passengers at all.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
seydor 2y ago
That's not a useful metric. Please tell us how many microseconds of life they gained
- HPsquared 2y ago
  At a certain point, the time gained due to relativistic effects will equal the time lost to fatal accidents. (Or do I have this backwards?)
  - 05 2y ago
    There's also extra radiation exposure due to less atmospheric shielding (and there's no minimal safe levels for ionizing, anything extra increases your cancer risk), so it probably won't work out to a positive outcome. Oh, and risk of catching an infection in the plane or airport is higher than in your own car - and that outweighs both crash and radiation risks..
- UltraSane 2y ago
  At the very least it is an interesting one and an amazing human accomplishment.
petargyurov 2y ago
I loathe aggregated stats like these. Combined hours watch time, combined miles traveled, etc... it serves no purpose other than to come up with a huge number.
- VMG 2y ago
  "Non-aggregating statistics" sounds like a fascinating field of research
  - Novosell 2y ago
    You'd quickly get into making up new units that are aggregates but you don't call them that and there would be no end of bikeshedding about what "aggregate" means. Isn't "distance traveled" by a car really just an aggregate of revolutions of the tires?
    - ndileas 2y ago
      My nonaggregate quanta is electrical pulses in the ignition system, thankyou.
- Arnt 2y ago
  Then you'll appreciate how the huge number is used to show "just how incredibly safe US airlines have become." No crashes since 2009, wow huge number! IIRC Finnair has the best record, no crashes since 1963 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Finnair_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Finnair_accidents_and...
- UltraSane 2y ago
  Statistics only has power when aggregating large numbers of events.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    I don't think OP implied that they loathe all aggregated statistics. They likely loathe a subset which was implied with like this
metalman 2y ago
the title could be construed as a new aproximation of zero ,as 2 light years ,put into its own context ,is such a tiny infitisimal proportion of all possible "light years" ,that calculating it accuratly would incrue more energy requirements than our sun can provide
dTal 2y ago
This is framed misleadingly as a risk calculation, but the math is unfairly generous because planes go a long way and carry a lot of people. It is not a valid calculation for "how likely am I to die if I get on a plane". Imagine if each plane carried a million people, and traveled a million miles in a single flight, and 1 plane in a dozen vaporized all its passengers. By the logic of the post, you would crunch the same safety number - "passenger miles between accidents" - but we would not call such a mode of transport safe because you have a 1-in-a-dozen chance of death. If you are going to sum up passenger miles, rather than aircraft miles, you need to compare that against passenger-accidents, rather than aircraft-accidents. Each aircraft crash kills about 100 people at a time, so that "2 light years" figure is two orders of magnitude too generous, right from the start. There are other arguments to be made about "passenger-miles" as an entire concept (air miles are not always fungible with other modes of transport, and a plane which explodes on takeoff 1% of the time is not safer if you fly it farther each flight) but I'll stop here.
- enkid 2y ago
  Just look at likelihood you are going to die each mile traveled. Using that method, passenger planes are 750 times safer than cars.
  - dTal 2y ago
    I was taking issue specifically with the calculation in the article, not making an unrelated comparative analysis of planes vs cars. That being said, such stats as yours do not tell the whole story. The likelihood of dying while driving across the Atlantic Ocean approaches 100%...
  - dTal 2y ago
    Oh, and fun fact: an Apollo moon mission racked up nearly 3 million passenger miles per flight and did not suffer a single fatality. Even if the astronauts on Apollo 13 had not survived, and the whole program cancelled right then and there, by fatalities-per-passenger-mile a Saturn V to the moon would still be far "safer" than driving, which averages one death every quarter of a million miles. I think this demonstrates two important flaws with the "passenger miles" concept: 1, miles are not always fungible between modes of transport. 2, intuitively we care more about the risk per trip, rather than the risk per mile.
sedan_baklazhan 2y ago
I would guess that all people who ever lived on Earth have traveled many light years already on their bare feet. What use is this "statistics" for?
- UltraSane 2y ago
  Obviously to show how incredibly safe air travel has become in the US.
- prennert 2y ago
  People who ever lived on Earth is just over a magnitude more than were alive in 2020 (7% of all people every alive lived in 2020) [0]. But interestingly if you divide a light-year by 117 Billion (the number of people ever alive according to [0]) it comes down to about 80 000 km per person (coincidently 2x the Earth circumference). If the average life-span was 80 years, that would bring the daily travelled distance to 2.7km per person, or 5.4km if average life-span was 40. 5.4k is easily done in an hour (especially by people walking as their main mode of transport). So yeah, maybe all people that ever lived together walked somewhere between 1-10 lightyears together. So all in all, not that much compared to US airlines in the last 15 years. [0]: https://info.nicic.gov/ces/global/population-demographics/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-earth https://info.nicic.gov/ces/global/population-demographics/ho...
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    the vast majority of humans died before the age of 15.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  So, if the 8 billion people on Earth each walk 5 miles per day, that's an aggregate 2.5 lightyears/year of travel. Actual values may vary, but within an order of magnitude, humans collectively do probably walk about a lightyear per year or so.
tompccs 2y ago
Don't give in to the temptation to write this off as a trite statistic. If the aviation industry never existed and all those miles were done by road, that's more than 170,000 additional deaths in the US since 2009 [1]. You may argue that not all aviation traffic would convert to road, and I'd agree - so to look at it another way, aviation has created a huge uplift in human potential by enabling more travel than ever with zero (or negative) direct human cost. [1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state#:~:text=Posted%20June%202024.-,Fatal%20crash%20totals,per%20100%20million%20miles%20traveled https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state....
- cenamus 2y ago
  Those miles would have never been done all on road so that comparison falls really short. People wouldn't drive coast to coast multiple times a year on business trips, just as they do the same with flying. But an analogy with hours travelled via plane/car/train/bus would be interesting
- foxyv 2y ago
  If you look at per-trip statistics, trains are six times safer than flying. Per-mile, planes always do much better. Cars just honestly suck for safety, cost, and externalities.
formvoltron 2y ago
When people wonder how humans can alter something as big as our atmosphere... well just remind them that US airlines have travelled 2 light years within it. That's just US airlines!
hypeatei 2y ago
100% of people who fly on airplanes die.
deleted 2y ago
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keraf 2y ago
Having spent a lot of time at a hangar at international airport in Africa and flying there, I can say that there's a thin line between crashes and incidents that could have resulted in a disaster. The former being extremely rare while the latter occurs so frequently it's scary. Between pilot errors, ATC mistakes and bad aircraft/airport maintenance, I've witnessed and heard of many near misses and incidents that have miraculously not turned into something worse. Passengers are completely oblivious what they narrowly escaped. I often talk about my experience to my peers in Europe. They have similar stories, albeit not happening as frequently. Looking at accident reports on Aviation Safety Network [0] and breakdowns on YouTube such as videos from Mentour Pilot [1], some of the factors that contributed to crashes still occur frequently without resulting in an accident. It's usually a combination of multiple failures that lead to it. My flight instructor used to tell me, every aggravating factor (i.e. lack of sleep, low fuel quantity, complacency, assumptions, etc.) fills a glass which leaves less and less space to luck until it runs over. [0] https://asn.flightsafety.org/ https://asn.flightsafety.org/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot
- jwkpiano1 2y ago
  What you’re referring to is called the Swiss cheese model, and the many layers that comprise its design are critical to ensuring safety. It’s precisely due to this design that air travel is so safe. Cars are not designed with nearly as many backup systems.
eco-traveler 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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91 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

> It shows me how hard it is to notice the absence of something. I was not aware that no US airline had crashed in the past 15 years. And I didn’t realize what an incredible safety record this represents, given how many people are boarding flights every day. Pure luck though with the whole Boeing thing. There's no particular reason why those 350-odd dead in two crashes couldn't have happened to an US airline. (It would've been better for aviation safety if it did).

dotancohen 2y ago
It's been a while and I don't remember the details, but if I remember correctly US airlines' aircraft were equipped with dual airspeed sensors, or some other sensor. Or both sensors were used as inputs to the MCAS.
- belter 2y ago
  They always had two, but the disagree alert was the extra. It's still mindblowing when you read again the details, and realize nobody went to prison... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    Not only did no one go to prison but Boeing got an incredibly generous deferred prosecution deal that said that if they didn't break the law for two years the government would drop the charges and then Boeing couldn't even do that and then plead guilty. But they only get a pretty tiny $243.6 million fine
- foldr 2y ago
  I don't think the disagree alert would have helped. Pilots weren't trained on MCAS, so they wouldn't have thought "oh, the AoA sensors disagree, so I'd better switch to manual trim".
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > Pilots weren't trained on MCAS And it wasn't referenced anywhere other than the glossary which explained what the abbreviation meant, so they had no chance.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    Both MCAS crashes would have been avoided if the crew correctly executed the memory-item runaway stab trim checklist. (The second crew almost saved it by first correctly executing that checklist, then reversing that corrective action while trying to recover, after which point the flight was lost.) That’s what Boeing was counting on (and was terribly wrong in retrospect).
    - foldr 2y ago
      Indeed. I made the same point here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42295005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42295005
berti 2y ago
Certainly not just down to luck across the industry as a whole though. That particular type was exempt from a bunch of regulations, written in blood, that all the other popular types comply with.
foldr 2y ago
I think pilot training is almost certainly a factor. Technically, Boeing are correct that a fully trained and competent 737 pilot should have been able to execute the runaway trim procedure (which is a memory item) and recover the aircraft without incident. However, the fact that two sets of pilots failed to do this in quick succession showed that pilot training could not be relied on to this extent in practice. On average, pilot training ought to be better in the US than in many (not all) other countries.
raverbashing 2y ago
> There's no particular reason why those 350-odd dead in two crashes couldn't have happened to an US airline. True, but in practice, not so American pilots had two things for them here: 1) more aware of maintenance needs of speed sensors (and probably better SOPs as well regarding disagreeing sensors) and 2) more experience with flying manually (on older 737s even) and acting correctly if MCAS went haywire
- jowea 2y ago
  Isn't a big part of the issue for the first incident that pilots didn't know MCAS even existed?
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    Yes, but there existed a procedure for "Runaway Trim" (This showed up in Google but I think the 1st answer, rather than OP is right here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416050 - of course now we have the FAA report)
sofixa 2y ago
> Pure luck though with the whole Boeing thing. There's no particular reason why those 350-odd dead in two crashes couldn't have happened to an US airline. (It would've been better for aviation safety if it did). And also the door blowout, in which Boeing employees forgot to put bolts back in, because they sidestepped the system, wasn't a crash only thanks to pure luck. The door could have easily taken parts of the tail with it, potentially severing horizontal/vertical stabilisers, hydraulics, etc. It could have been a very deadly affair.

delta_p_delta_x 2y ago

The number of unit systems in this article is mind-boggling. Just use SI!

HPsquared 2y ago
2.3 light years is 2.18E+16 metres (21,759,680,086,934,100 metres or about 22 petametres). Not the easiest figure to comprehend!
eru 2y ago
They flew around 2 petametre since the last crash around 0.5 Gigaseconds ago. I guess it's an article both about the US and about airtravel, so they're gonna use freedom units.
UltraSane 2y ago
Using light years is perfectly appropriate when talking about trillions of kilometers because 1ly is about 9 trillion km. Should astronomers stop using light years?
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Just use SI! Why? Ly, parsecs and AU are intuitively useful in astronomy in a way e.g. Pm are not. They’re also both trivially convertible yet not commonly converted. If anything, quoting in SI because someone’s being dogmatic is more likely to introduce errors as everyone converts to the customary units. (Airplanes aren’t astronomical entities. But the author is making an astronomical analogy.)

55555 2y ago

I once analyzed the numbers and flying isn't actually much safer than driving per trip. The numbers look insanely good because they quote them per mile. Google says 1 death in 6 million trips vs 1 in 8 million, if you ask it twice so it actually does the math correctly.

wesselbindt 2y ago
I'm not sure why looking at the incidents per trip would be preferable over looking at the incidents per mile. If I think about comparing two activities when it comes to safety, I feel like I'd want to look at the number of incidents per second of performing either activity. EDIT: here's a thought experiment. You're taking a trip to the grocery store. You have two routes in mind, the direct one, which takes 5 minutes, and the detour via the North Pole, which will take weeks. One of these trips is safer than the other.
- Qem 2y ago
  > I'm not sure why looking at the incidents per trip would be preferable over looking at the incidents per mile. Personally when enter a vehicle and start a trip, I'm interested in arriving at the destination alive, regardless of distance. If something bad happens, whether I die 1km into it, or 10.000km into, is quite pointless. So incidents per trip probably conform better to how people evaluate travel risks.
  - martylamb 2y ago
    That might be true for most and is a reasonable way of looking at it. But if someone is going on a 10,000km trip and trying to choose between modes of travel, the mode with the fewest incidents per mile will be the safest way.
  - wesselbindt 2y ago
    Exactly, so when I get in that car, I want to know the probability of dying. How do you compute this? By taking the number of crashes per kilometer, and multiplying by the number of kilometers you'll drive for. A trip of 5000km is less safe than a 5km one. That's just common sense. Similarly, when comparing flying versus driving from Amsterdam to Paris, you are, as you say, interested in which method is most likely to get you to your destination alive. So you take the number of incidents per kilometer for planes and cars, and multiply them by the distance between Amsterdam and Paris. The interesting figure really is incidents / kilometer, that's just basic math.

CM30 2y ago

It's also a good example of how public perception and actual stats often differ significantly. If you asked people whether driving or flying were safer, I suspect most would say the former. But statistically speaking, the latter is so much safer it's almost unreal, it's just that the worst case scenarios get a lot more attention there when they do happen. That said, it is worth noting that an increased focus on safety comes with trade offs. If everything was held to aircraft standards of safety, then every project under the sun would also take significantly longer, cost significantly more and probably be less user friendly for the end user. But that doesn't happen, because a less safe system is often 'good enough' for other fields.

eru 2y ago
Apart from nuclear power: that's held to even higher safety standards than flying. With exactly the cost overruns and schedule delays you predict.
- Arnt 2y ago
  I think you mean that nuclear power generators are required to take extremely expensive safety measures when they handle significant amounts of radioactive materials (several thick concrete walls around the nuclear material, regular thorough inspection of the walls, and so on and so forth). Planes are not required to do that. However, it's a bit unfair, because the safety regulations for radioactive materials prohibit air transport of such amounts. You're saying that "handle with extreme care" is a higher safety standard than "doing that is forbidden".
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Apart from nuclear power: that's held to even higher safety standards than flying. And with good reason. Fukushima rendered large amounts of land uninhabitable for years, Chernobyl to this very day impacts fungi and wild pig meat in places as far away as Bavaria - and that's just the two fatal accident scenarios. On top of that come all the other incidents - the cleanup of Sellafield for example will cost > 130 billion pounds [1], a result of decades of negligence. Nuclear power is only financially viable when taxpayers of all the countries surrounding a NPP pick up the bill in the disaster case. Would every NPP be required to obtain actual insurance to account for disasters, it would be among the most expensive ways to generate power. In contrast, the most damage that a runaway airplane can cause is a few thousand deaths, by piloting it into a skyscraper. [1] https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1058944/sellafield-nuclear-waste-dump-costs-surge-to-136bn-leaving-questions-over-value-1058944.html https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1058944/...

rotten 2y ago

The new head of the FAA promises to make flying safe again by getting rid of minority and women pilots.

sofixa 2y ago

> The last time a US airline crashed was on February 12, 2009, in New York State. Fifty people died.1 This is just wrong. Atlas Air Flight 3591 was in 2019, with the loss of 3 souls on board. And it was a regularly scheduled airline flight, just cargo, not passenger. Still an airline crash by a US airline on US soil. Also, Alaska Air 1282 was a very near miss, and it's only pure luck that the door didn't take parts of the tail with it, which could have been catastrophic.

HPsquared 2y ago
The denominator is "passenger mile", those don't have passengers. Would be interesting to look into whether cargo flights have higher accident rate than passenger flights.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  If you include all the feeder aircraft routes (lots of single-engine Grand Caravans and the like), it’s much, much worse than US airline passenger flights. Reasons include a mix of equipment, flying on the wrong side of the clock (often by low-time pilots with other jobs), lots of single pilot ops, driving for the lowest possible cost and highest dispatch rate, less oversight (and a little bit more cowboy as a result), and lots of short legs to airports with shorter runways, fewer runways, and often less services (snow removal, ATC, de-icing, etc.)
- sofixa 2y ago
  Yes, but this is from the introduction of the article. It isn't until the 6th paragraph of the article, after the part I quoted in the 5th one, that they mention anything about passengers. Before that it's all about "(air)plane crashes" and "US airlines", no mention of passengers at all.
deleted 2y ago
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seydor 2y ago

That's not a useful metric. Please tell us how many microseconds of life they gained

HPsquared 2y ago
At a certain point, the time gained due to relativistic effects will equal the time lost to fatal accidents. (Or do I have this backwards?)
- 05 2y ago
  There's also extra radiation exposure due to less atmospheric shielding (and there's no minimal safe levels for ionizing, anything extra increases your cancer risk), so it probably won't work out to a positive outcome. Oh, and risk of catching an infection in the plane or airport is higher than in your own car - and that outweighs both crash and radiation risks..
UltraSane 2y ago
At the very least it is an interesting one and an amazing human accomplishment.

petargyurov 2y ago

I loathe aggregated stats like these. Combined hours watch time, combined miles traveled, etc... it serves no purpose other than to come up with a huge number.

VMG 2y ago
"Non-aggregating statistics" sounds like a fascinating field of research
- Novosell 2y ago
  You'd quickly get into making up new units that are aggregates but you don't call them that and there would be no end of bikeshedding about what "aggregate" means. Isn't "distance traveled" by a car really just an aggregate of revolutions of the tires?
  - ndileas 2y ago
    My nonaggregate quanta is electrical pulses in the ignition system, thankyou.
Arnt 2y ago
Then you'll appreciate how the huge number is used to show "just how incredibly safe US airlines have become." No crashes since 2009, wow huge number! IIRC Finnair has the best record, no crashes since 1963 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Finnair_accidents_and_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Finnair_accidents_and...
UltraSane 2y ago
Statistics only has power when aggregating large numbers of events.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  I don't think OP implied that they loathe all aggregated statistics. They likely loathe a subset which was implied with like this

metalman 2y ago

the title could be construed as a new aproximation of zero ,as 2 light years ,put into its own context ,is such a tiny infitisimal proportion of all possible "light years" ,that calculating it accuratly would incrue more energy requirements than our sun can provide

dTal 2y ago

This is framed misleadingly as a risk calculation, but the math is unfairly generous because planes go a long way and carry a lot of people. It is not a valid calculation for "how likely am I to die if I get on a plane". Imagine if each plane carried a million people, and traveled a million miles in a single flight, and 1 plane in a dozen vaporized all its passengers. By the logic of the post, you would crunch the same safety number - "passenger miles between accidents" - but we would not call such a mode of transport safe because you have a 1-in-a-dozen chance of death. If you are going to sum up passenger miles, rather than aircraft miles, you need to compare that against passenger-accidents, rather than aircraft-accidents. Each aircraft crash kills about 100 people at a time, so that "2 light years" figure is two orders of magnitude too generous, right from the start. There are other arguments to be made about "passenger-miles" as an entire concept (air miles are not always fungible with other modes of transport, and a plane which explodes on takeoff 1% of the time is not safer if you fly it farther each flight) but I'll stop here.

enkid 2y ago
Just look at likelihood you are going to die each mile traveled. Using that method, passenger planes are 750 times safer than cars.
- dTal 2y ago
  I was taking issue specifically with the calculation in the article, not making an unrelated comparative analysis of planes vs cars. That being said, such stats as yours do not tell the whole story. The likelihood of dying while driving across the Atlantic Ocean approaches 100%...
- dTal 2y ago
  Oh, and fun fact: an Apollo moon mission racked up nearly 3 million passenger miles per flight and did not suffer a single fatality. Even if the astronauts on Apollo 13 had not survived, and the whole program cancelled right then and there, by fatalities-per-passenger-mile a Saturn V to the moon would still be far "safer" than driving, which averages one death every quarter of a million miles. I think this demonstrates two important flaws with the "passenger miles" concept: 1, miles are not always fungible between modes of transport. 2, intuitively we care more about the risk per trip, rather than the risk per mile.

sedan_baklazhan 2y ago

I would guess that all people who ever lived on Earth have traveled many light years already on their bare feet. What use is this "statistics" for?

UltraSane 2y ago
Obviously to show how incredibly safe air travel has become in the US.
prennert 2y ago
People who ever lived on Earth is just over a magnitude more than were alive in 2020 (7% of all people every alive lived in 2020) [0]. But interestingly if you divide a light-year by 117 Billion (the number of people ever alive according to [0]) it comes down to about 80 000 km per person (coincidently 2x the Earth circumference). If the average life-span was 80 years, that would bring the daily travelled distance to 2.7km per person, or 5.4km if average life-span was 40. 5.4k is easily done in an hour (especially by people walking as their main mode of transport). So yeah, maybe all people that ever lived together walked somewhere between 1-10 lightyears together. So all in all, not that much compared to US airlines in the last 15 years. [0]: https://info.nicic.gov/ces/global/population-demographics/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-earth https://info.nicic.gov/ces/global/population-demographics/ho...
- UltraSane 2y ago
  the vast majority of humans died before the age of 15.
dredmorbius 2y ago
So, if the 8 billion people on Earth each walk 5 miles per day, that's an aggregate 2.5 lightyears/year of travel. Actual values may vary, but within an order of magnitude, humans collectively do probably walk about a lightyear per year or so.

tompccs 2y ago

Don't give in to the temptation to write this off as a trite statistic. If the aviation industry never existed and all those miles were done by road, that's more than 170,000 additional deaths in the US since 2009 [1]. You may argue that not all aviation traffic would convert to road, and I'd agree - so to look at it another way, aviation has created a huge uplift in human potential by enabling more travel than ever with zero (or negative) direct human cost. [1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state#:~:text=Posted%20June%202024.-,Fatal%20crash%20totals,per%20100%20million%20miles%20traveled https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state....

cenamus 2y ago
Those miles would have never been done all on road so that comparison falls really short. People wouldn't drive coast to coast multiple times a year on business trips, just as they do the same with flying. But an analogy with hours travelled via plane/car/train/bus would be interesting
foxyv 2y ago
If you look at per-trip statistics, trains are six times safer than flying. Per-mile, planes always do much better. Cars just honestly suck for safety, cost, and externalities.

formvoltron 2y ago

When people wonder how humans can alter something as big as our atmosphere... well just remind them that US airlines have travelled 2 light years within it. That's just US airlines!

hypeatei 2y ago

100% of people who fly on airplanes die.

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keraf 2y ago

Having spent a lot of time at a hangar at international airport in Africa and flying there, I can say that there's a thin line between crashes and incidents that could have resulted in a disaster. The former being extremely rare while the latter occurs so frequently it's scary. Between pilot errors, ATC mistakes and bad aircraft/airport maintenance, I've witnessed and heard of many near misses and incidents that have miraculously not turned into something worse. Passengers are completely oblivious what they narrowly escaped. I often talk about my experience to my peers in Europe. They have similar stories, albeit not happening as frequently. Looking at accident reports on Aviation Safety Network [0] and breakdowns on YouTube such as videos from Mentour Pilot [1], some of the factors that contributed to crashes still occur frequently without resulting in an accident. It's usually a combination of multiple failures that lead to it. My flight instructor used to tell me, every aggravating factor (i.e. lack of sleep, low fuel quantity, complacency, assumptions, etc.) fills a glass which leaves less and less space to luck until it runs over. [0] https://asn.flightsafety.org/ https://asn.flightsafety.org/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot

jwkpiano1 2y ago
What you’re referring to is called the Swiss cheese model, and the many layers that comprise its design are critical to ensuring safety. It’s precisely due to this design that air travel is so safe. Cars are not designed with nearly as many backup systems.

eco-traveler 2y ago

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