[stevehawk]

This is a big term in aviation, because in most cases in order for something catastrophic to happen it requires a lot of things to have failed. And one way to ensure that enough things fail is to start deviating from your maintenance, inspections, or general responsibilities. Related: the swiss cheese models.

[kurthr]

It's also why things in aviation are so fixed and difficult to change. Not having any new civil aviation planes for 30 years worked... how about 40, 50? When will it break? Well, when someone develops an easy to build, easy to fly, inexpensive experimental craft and zillions of people do it all at once (hasn't happened yet).

One of the more interesting things I've found is that a huge number (easily a majority) of instructors are recently trained flyers, because there is a pipeline to train them and they're cheaper than using experienced pilots (esp for multi-engine and more complex airplanes). They also know all the ins-outs of the training and rule books (with recent changes) so they know how to pass all the tests and how to teach that. Sooooo you have a bunch of inexperienced pilots teaching all the new pilots... there's likely a failure there, but it hasn't reared its head. We still have a lot of ex-military folks around who didn't learn that way.

Who do you want flying when things go bad? People who have spent many hours with things about to go bad (military, emergency/fire, sail plane pilots) who have experience dealing with it. Those people can also be fun/terrifying to fly with, because they will take risks.

[sokoloff]

> Not having any new civil aviation planes for 30 years worked...

The A220, A350, and A380 are all newer than 30 years old. (A321 is barely younger than that and A330 barely older.) Boeing has released the 777 and 787 in the last 30 years. The Cirrus SR20 and SR22 are newer than that, as is the SF50 jet. The Diamond DA40, DA42, and DA62 are newer. The Honda Jet is newer. Cessna has a handful of business jets newer than that. The Embraer Phenom 100 and 300 are newer than that. There are variants of the CRJ newer than that (-700, -900, -1000).

That's a lot of new civil aviation aircraft designs in the last 30 years.

[neilv]

> They also know all the ins-outs of the training and rule books (with recent changes) so they know how to pass all the tests and how to teach that. Sooooo you have a bunch of inexperienced pilots teaching all the new pilots...

Sounds like there's some similarities with everyone focusing on Leetcode interviews, and then one generation of that filtering and then mentoring the next, and repeat.

The companies don't know what that's costing them, until there's a problem that can't be ignored.

In the case of software engineering (poorly studied, relative to aviation) the company will generally never learn whether a non-Leetcode&promo-focused team could've avoided the problems in the first place, nor whether non-Leetcode experience could've handled a problem that happened anyway.

[lmm]

> Who do you want flying when things go bad? People who have spent many hours with things about to go bad (military, emergency/fire, sail plane pilots) who have experience dealing with it. Those people can also be fun/terrifying to fly with, because they will take risks.

Maybe. Or maybe you're better off with freshly trained people who still remember exactly what to do in all the failure scenarios. Certainly I've generally felt safer with drivers who'd just passed their test than with people who've been driving for years, for example.

[sokoloff]

Until a quite advanced age, I’d much rather be a passenger in a car driven by a driver with years of experience rather than a fresh license.

The stats seem to bear that out as well.

Commercial study: https://www.fleetowner.com/perspectives/ideaxchange/article/...

Teen study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12643948/

In aviation, there’s a “killing zone” from 50-350 flight hours (with 40 being the typical legal minimum hours for licensing and 60+ being more typical).

[pja]

> Those people can also be fun/terrifying to fly with, because they will take risks.

Risk homeostasis in action!

https://soaringeconomist.com/2019/10/30/experience-can-kill-...