Escalating scandal grips airlines including American and Southwest, as nearly 100 planes find fake parts from company with fake employees that vanished overnight::Why are so many flights getting canceled or delayed? Blame a mysterious British supplier accused of falsified documents for plane components.
My father has been designing and building bespoke aircraft for 45 years, was an FAA test pilot, inspector, and trainer for most of that time, and was in the US Air Force during the Korean War. He has more aviation experience than most.
His license plate reads GO RAIL and he won’t fly commercial if he can avoid it.
e: I am not surprised.
Sure, but… commercial airliners almost never crash?
Most planes in general don’t crash, fwiw. Most trains and cars don’t, either.
But would you rather your Uber was a Camry or a Lada Niva?
Planes are vastly safer than trains.
“Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 20 times higher than for buses, 17 times higher than for passenger trains, and 595 times higher than for scheduled airlines.”
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
Worth noting that the per-mile and per-trip stats are different. Planes have low per-mile rates because nobody sane is using a plane to get across town. They only use planes for long-distance trips where driving/taking the train isn’t feasible. So by default, planes will have low per-mile rates because virtually every trip is a high mileage event. In short, planes drastically water down their per-mile averages.
When you look at it from a per-trip viewpoint, cars are safer. Which makes sense. You drive to work hundreds of times per year, but maybe ride a plane twice? So a single car crash is going to be a drop in the bucket when compared to the thousands of car trips you’ve taken in your life, but a single plane crash will be a massive spike in the numbers.
I just wanted to point out how statistics can be used to justify either side. Lots of people want to rely on numbers for everything, as if statistics can’t be manipulated. But they can, and you can bet your ass that if a party has a vested interest in stats showing one result over another, a team of statisticians can figure out a way to make it happen.
In 95% of all car accidents, the driver has eaten carrot in the week prior to the accident.
you may now draw your own conclusion
TIL 95% of people eat carrots at least once a week.
I certainly don’t eat them nearly as often. I also don’t drive, so that checks out.
If you are considering two modes of transportation for a airplane-suitable trip, the per-trip stat is effectively irrelevant. If we consider a 1,000 mile trip and want to choose the safest manner of travel to the destination aircraft will statistically be the safest transportation method.
Thank you, PM_Your_Nudes_Please, for an wonderfully insightful comment on the nature of statistics in transportation accidents.
I don’t really agree. If I have two choices to make a long distance trip, drive or fly, it is safer to fly. If I’m going to the grocery store, there’s no option to fly, so using those type of trips in the calculation doesn’t make sense.
If we talk about the safety of cars vs planes, we should really only be considering trips of a distance where planes are a viable option. Even then a trips per crash seems like a far worse metric than miles per crash. You want to account for complexity of the trips still.
Do you have any statistics about the total number of miles driven by cars every day vs. miles flown by planes daily? Somehow, just based on the amount of cars worldwide, I’d bet that there are far more miles driven by cars daily than miles flown by planes, so accidents per mile would still be a significant statistic. Because even though planes fligh thousands of miles per trip, cars are numbered in millions, in the US alone. So I’d bet that if every car trip was one mile, which is very conservative, you’d still have more miles driven daily than flown in the US. Which makes deaths per mile a lot more scary.
Accidents per trip would be relevant as well, but how many commercial airliners crash every day vs. how many cars crash every day? How many people die a year from commercial airline crashes vs. from car crashes? I’d bet that even per trip cars are less safe than planes.
I live in a mostly rural area, and we have had 4 deaths on the motorway nearby over the past 3 or 4 months. And that is just in one region,with low to moderate traffic and low population density (lots of farms and woods around here). Also, never knew anyone who died in a plane crash, in over 40 years, but have had 2 close friends die in car crashes, never mind acquaintances or friends of friends. And I bet everyone, in developing or developed countries, knows someone who died in a car crash, whereas I’d bet that most people don’t have even acquaintances or friend of friends that died in plane crashes.
So I’d really like to see numbers on that claim that, per trip, cars are safer, because in 2021, with no deaths from commercial planes in the US, that claim does not stand, because you could have an infinite number of car trips that year, and still be less safe than commercial planes with one single dead person.
That’s true in general. Planes are very safe overall.
My father has some airlines he’s okay with and some he won’t fly under any circumstances. I’m not talking about overall statistics, but what he knows about the industry’s practices, including mechanical and pilot issues.
Just my .02$
Uhhhh… can we get his list of those he won’t fly on?
I’ll ask next time we play VR mini golf this Saturday.
Niva🤩
That’s a bit of a myth. Large commercial planes are very save, that’s true. Small planes and helicopters on the other side can be very dangerous, as they fly around in far less controlled situations. They are so dangerous in fact that being a pilot is one of the most dangerous jobs around, only behind logging.
deleted by creator
Yes, sorry, I meant commercial planes. I should have clarified.
When I was young and learning to fly, he told me if I ever got into ultralites he’d disown me (he was sort of kidding).
I wouldn’t care because I understand how probability works.
When I’m driving down the highway, I spend as little time as possible next to semi-trailers because I’ve met loads of drivers and know how many are on heavy drugs or haven’t slept for far too long so they can meet their deadlines.
Probability-wise, it’s safe, but I don’t like it. Not everything is about raw numbers, Mr Spock.
1NR is trying hard to change that
After all of the high profile train derailments in recent history, primarily caused by decaying infrastructure, bad standards, and cutting corners, makes me wonder if there’s someone with an extensive background in rail out there with a license plate that says “FLY AIR”.
I guess it’s really just a question of whether you take the risk you know or the one you don’t.
That’s cargo rail tho. Fatal passenger rail accidents are very rare and involve multiple human and system failures.
Yikes.
For a while I hated flying. Freaked me out even though I knew statistically it is a safe form of travel. Then I watched a bunch of Air Disasters shows and realized how many fixes they have put in place and I felt a lot better about flying.
Then I subbed to /r/AviationMaintenance. I really don’t want to fly anymore.
The whole Boeing Max shitshow is why flying makes me nervous now.
Flying is still safer than driving, FWIW. Not sure if that makes you feel better about flying or worse about driving (for me it’s the latter).
It’s kinda weird actually how normalized driving is. There’s a lot of people who are so scared of flying that they won’t do it. But far fewer people take such an approach to being in a personal vehicle, despite being massively more dangerous.
I think it’s because car deaths are just so normalized that most people are numb to them. It’s kinda like that iconic Joker monologue about how it’s “all according to the plan”. People are afraid of exemplary things, not the mundane things that will actually kill them.
Also, not driving is not really an option in a lot of places. Driving terrifies me, but I just have to deal or not eat 🤷♂️
I’m personally more afraid of driving. The learning and tests for pilots are extensive (I’ve done a lot of it), but any moron can get a driving license, and most lose much of that knowledge shortly after.
Other drivers are fucking scary.
The first time I went skydiving, my instructor was a retired aircraft mechanic. He said something along the lines of “People always ask me why I’d want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. I tell them that I worked on planes for 30 years, and there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.”
Used to think it was statistically safe, then 737MAX crashes happened. Not trusting any airplane manufacturer any more.
Sounds like my dad, who after working as a computer programmer consultant since the early 70s, has become a Luddite, to the point that he won’t even wear a digital watch. I wonder what a railroad engineer would tell your father.
It would not take much for a boiler on a train to blow, I’m sure there were all sorts of corners cut.
Do Diesel engines even use boilers? I know electric ones don’t. You don’t see a whole lot of functioning steam engines these days. They are neat though. Noisy AF.
I thought you were talking back in the day when you referenced railroad engineers talking to op’s father. Ie even way back when the people that ran old steam locomotives had the same opinion.
Funny enough my FIL was a train engineer for steam engines but transitioned to maintaining boilers at a hospital as most steam engines were being phased out early in his career.
My dad is the opposite of a Luddite. At 88, he still works for the airplane manufacturer, builds his own computers, and is getting into VR.
The FRA (federal railway administration) is scary. I would trust a train for sure.
Wasn’t everybody saying the opposite like 3 months ago?
The regulation on passenger rail is MUCH stronger then on freight.
Well I guess it’s not mechanic failures of the train that derails them.
That’s freight rail. Freight rail is a full blown late-stage capitalist hellscape. Aging infrastructure that hasn’t seen maintenance since the New Deal, companies that refuse to update equipment because paying out lawsuits when it breaks is cheaper, overworked employees who aren’t even allowed to call out sick, etc…
Compared to that, passenger rail is a fucking pipedream.
But doesn’t Amtrak share the same rails with freight? Sure maybe the trains themselves are better maintained but if the rails themselves are in bad shape the train won’t get far.
Perhaps, but you don’t have as far to fall.
(e: oh, I mistook your comment for sarcasm. Ignore my reply; I agree.)
Ergo, less time to contemplate your last moments. I like it.
Once you’ve seen the sausage made it’s hard to love sausage. Doesn’t mean the sausage is terrible, it just makes you think of watching it get made.
Earlier this year a bunch of people got stuck on a 4 hour Amtrak ride for like 18+ hours, without power, toilets or water. Were told they couldn’t leave and not allowed/able to transfer to another train.
I’d rather just die in an incredibly rare plane crash than trust AmTrak to get me across the country in days versus a flight which can get me there in hours.
They need budget to actually upgrade their fleet.
That’s happened multiple times with planes, not just once last year.
It happened as recently as last month
Here are more:
July 2023
June 2023
December 2022
May 2022.
I could keep going, but this is hard on mobile.
Point is, that happens with planes, too. That’s a logistics issue, not about the method of transport.
Story may have a bit of “then everyone clapped” vibes, but I can definitely get down with more trains.