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> It's basically just random chance that some planes every year will crash because of pilot error. When you design a system where errors can cause a large numb
by alphaBetaGamma 13y ago
> It's basically just random chance that some planes every year will crash because of pilot error.
When you design a system where errors can cause a large number of deaths (airplanes, trains, nuclear reactors,...), your objective is to have very few accidents (nobody can guarantee zero). Having someone to blame when an accident happens -- the pilot did not follow procedure -- is not enough.
Your system design must be human error tolerant, because you know these will happen. To take an extreme example, if a drunk pilot error causes an accident it's not only his fault, but there probably also is a systemic error which caused this criminal behavior (which is a possibility you expect) to cause an accident: maybe the cockpit culture was such that the co-pilot was frightened to stand up to the drunk pilot.
- alanctgardner2 13y agoI guess my point was that airline safety hits a sort of horizontal asymptote as you put in effort. You'll go years and years without accidents, have one, and then struggle to generalize a rule from this incredibly freak event. My biggest complaint is that the whole 'East Asian culture causes deference to authority, crashes planes' argument is a huge generalization with very little data to back it up. In any other context, the number of events we're talking about would be anecdotal.