[Dalewyn]

Manufacturing certifications, installation and maintenance inspections and certifications, auditing, etc.

To put it into some relatable context, a simple electrical switch that you might grab for a few bucks at your local Home Depot would cost at least several hundreds of dollars because of all the red tape that must be satisfied for safety reasons.

Safety isn't cheap.

[fragmede]

Red tape isn't the phrase I'd use in this context since your point is that the switch will work 100% of the time even after being thru a literal hurricane, so the difference isn't merely the tape, but that there's been proper testing and engineering all the way down, which drives the cost way up.

[bumby]

Unfortunately, this is exactly how it's characterized in the aerospace industry. Often the requirements that are design to reduce/verify quality and safety requirements are talked about as "bureaucracy" and "just paperwork."

[Dalewyn]

I admit my vocabulary is failing me at the moment in finding similarly concise words to describe it, but I'm happy if the meaning gets through one way or another.

[fragmede]

one way to phrase it might be to change

> because of all the red tape that must be

to

because of all the rigoy testing and precise engineering that has to be

[dsfyu404ed]

Every strip of BS red adhesive has some flimsy pretext to justify it.

Nobody is saying you can't pour theoretically meaningful pork into a traffic light in the form of QA and whatnot and get an indestructible traffic light that operates for a century without being touched in return. People are questioning whether that's actually necessary for a system that's already the Nth layer of redundancy.

[bumby]

I don't know how airport infrastructure requirements work, but for the actual airframes themselves, the requisite level of reliability/redundancy are strictly defined. I would imagine airport design is similar. If so, it's clear if it's necessary or not.

[Dalewyn]

I realize reading this now that "red tape" was not the appropriate way to convey what I'm trying to convey. I'm going to try and figure out how to rephrase that better in the future.

All those inspections, certifications, and other requirements exist for very good reasons. Reasons that more likely than not cost us blood and tears to realize their need.

[dsfyu404ed]

>All those inspections, certifications, and other requirements exist for very good reasons

Nobody's debating that those processes work. People are questioning whether or to what degree this system should be subject to them. Just because something touches aviation somehow is not a blank ticket to pour red tape at it to satisfy some ideological lust for the "perfectly safe" system. For example, the facility lighting around an airport is just normal lighting used on any other large commercial facility, off the shelf sodium bulbs, LEDs, halogens in off the shelf fixtures, the kind of stuff you buy from all myriad of online supply houses and local suppliers. The runway lights are subject to much more specific requirements (but still very relaxed compared to the lighting on actual aircraft). Where do the traffic lights fall on that spectrum? IDK, but seeing as the system is never gonna leave the ground I'm pretty inclined to ignore whatever the people who think it needs to be designed like an aircraft have to say.

> Reasons that more likely than not cost us blood and tears to realize their need.

If/when they mandate a traffic light system at JFK will that rule be "written in blood" as you people often like to say?

[ars]

The extra cost for safety is reducing safety because it's causing this not to get installed.

Maybe it's worth having a worse system that actually is there.

[Spooky23]

Easy to preach, harder to practice.

When I was an intern I got to help change the blinking red light on top of a 50 story building. It’s a big deal that was scheduled weeks in advance and probably involved two dozen people, a special lightbulb and a bunch of coordination.

Even among the team working it plenty of “how many X does it take to change a light bulb” jokes were told.

But consider than a pilot depends on certain things being there when things go wrong. If the weather is bad and there’s issues with instruments, seeing that red light is the difference between life and death. There are potentially dozens or hundreds of people on a plane and if I recall correctly up to 4,000 people in the building.

When life is at risk, the standard for engineering must be higher.

[mypalmike]

There are already crews at every major airport that inspect and replace runway lights every day. Maintaining more lights doesn't seem like a massive new undertaking in the way you are describing.

[CamperBob2]

What would be better for safety? One $10000 light bulb, or ten $10 light bulbs?

[icehawk]

How much more/less often do those ten $10 light bulbs go out?

How did you prove that?

If its more often, does an outage need to be detected? How do you detect that lightbulb went out?

How much does that cost?

[nerdponx]

The former, if the latter fails to satisfy some design constraint.

[labster]

Compared to the cost of an air incident, $9900 is a rounding error. You’d need an actuary to know for sure, but even small differences in safety margin can be worth the cost in aviation.

[thaumasiotes]

> Compared to the cost of an air incident, $9900 is a rounding error.

Doesn't matter; that's not a comparison that's relevant to any decision here.

How many additional crashes per year are prevented by the high-cost bulbs, and how many additional dollars per year does it cost to install them on every building?

Maybe the 10 $10 light bulbs need to be replaced once a year and they cost $150 / year. Maybe the one $10,000 bulb needs to be replaced every 15 years and costs $900 / year. Once you've gotten to that point, at least you know what the cost difference is.

Then you can either ask "how many planes would crash into the Chrysler building every year if it was using 10 bulbs from Home Depot, compared to the one bulb it's currently using?", and compare that to $750. In that case you'd get an answer that told you whether the Chrysler building should use a special bulb. Or you could ask "how many planes would crash into buildings anywhere in the world every year if they all used 10 bulbs from Home Depot instead of what they currently use?", compare that to $750 multiplied by the number of tall buildings in the world, and you'd get an answer that would tell you whether it'd be better for every building in the world to use commodity bulbs or for all of them to use the bespoke bulbs.

But you'd never ask "which costs more, one fancy lightbulb or one crashing plane?". That won't tell you anything.

[Spooky23]

What’s better for safety? Predicable reliability or whatever the subcontractor is putting out in a particular day

[gregmac]

If this system fails when needed, every cent spent on it will be considered a waste. Nobody is going to say "sure, 300 people died and a couple $150m planes were destroyed.. but we saved a couple million dollars when it was installed 7 years ago".

[dsfyu404ed]

It would be ideologically convenient for you if people died but statistically it's just gonna be another close call since close calls outnumber accidents in this field by a ton to one.

If/when it happens the professionals who deal in this stuff will say something mundane like "this system prevented ten close calls before we actually had one slip through, that's pretty great". And they'll replace the $5 lightbulb and move the "check the bulbs" from the monthly maintenance checklist to the weekly checklist. And you'll complain much like you're complaining now.

[bumby]

>close calls outnumber accidents in this field by a ton to one

The irony is that the reason the safety numbers are that good is because aerospace is one of the only 5+ sigma quality/safety industries.

[dsfyu404ed]

All industries have close calls outnumbering real accidents by a ton.

The fact that the absolute numbers are low does not change any calculations that follow from that ratio.

[bumby]

Look at the history of aviation before it was a 5-sigma industry. The safety record was much worse.

If your point is that close calls will always outnumber the actual accidents, that’s like saying the number of doctor visits will outnumber the number of cancer diagnoses. Safety incidents are always a subset of a larger set that also contains close calls. By their nature, most safety incidents require multiple things to go wrong, which means there will be more times that some, but not all, things will go wrong to create a close call. It’s almost such a trivial point that it’s hardly salient enough to mention.

[ars]

Obviously, but that's not the question I asked. Right now it's not there at all - so would it be worth installing a less reliable system, but then you could have it in more places?

[jahewson]

Unreliable systems aren’t there when you need them.

[zmgsabst]

Neither are nonexistent systems.

[ClumsyPilot]

Imagine you are doing barrel roll and struggling to control a plane, and you have a parachute.

So you decide, scre the airplane, a will save my life, and jump out. Only it fails to open, it was an unreliable parachite, bought by someone like you. They thought,'better a 50/50 parachite then no parachute?

So now you are plummeting to you death, thinking, that if you did not have the confidence of 'I have a parachute' you woupd have never attemped the barrel roll in the first place. And you would have done your utmost to steady the plane, and probably would succeed. And you would not waste time packing it and fuel carrying it around with you.

[zmgsabst]

Why would you do a barrel roll in a plane full of passengers, when you’re being paid to operate it safely?

Your entire hypothetical is unlike the actual scenario, where this is being recommended.

Of course you have different solutions to a completely different problem — but what you haven’t addressed is why this is a bad solution to this particular problem.

[ClumsyPilot]

nono, imagine you have a personal 1 seater plane

The presence of a backup option affects your decision making. Human brain assumes the backup is reliable. If you install some 50/50 backup, you put more people at risk

[Dalewyn]

There is a psychological element to it.

If there's a safety mechanism that may or may not work, coming to rely on it is suicidal.

If there is no safety mechanism in the first place, you (hopefully!) never become complacent in the first place.

So it's better to either have a safety mechanism that will absolutely work every single time or nothing at all, than one that may or may not work and invite complacency.