[AndrewKemendo]

I’m starting to treat general aviation as though it was 50 years ago: Very unsafe and expensive

My expectation is that its going to take a serious accident to get anything to change.

I’m unaware of a highly utilized yet significantly broken system (Tacoma Narrows anyone?) that was able to improve iteratively without catastrophic failure driving improvement (Space Shuttle)

Most human systems don’t seem to have the ability to build fourth order forecasting into system design across all individual and integrated components

The idea of a “factor of safety” seems to be just completely missing in most engineering systems because tolerances mean waste and shareholders won’t allow waste that doesn’t go into their pockets

[amarshall]

Very unsafe? In the past 14 years there have been 72 fatalities involving US Air Carriers, out of around 250 million flight hours flown[1]. That’s fewer fatalities in 14 years than there are US motor vehicle fatalities in a single day (on average).

[1]: https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/StatisticalReviews/Pages/CivilAv...

[crmd]

Humans are bad at statistics. For example the incident at three mile island in 1979 didn't kill anyone, but the accident crystallized anti-nuclear safety concerns among activists and the general public, and accelerated the decline of efforts to build new reactors.

[Retric]

Don’t underestimate the direct effects.

Three mile island directly cost well over 1 billion in 1979 dollars (2+B today) just in terms of destroyed assets and initial cleanup costs. The wider impact was even more expensive.

Such a visible failure changed the risk/reward calculations which then hurt the nuclear industry quite a bit. We did keep building US nuclear reactors afterwards, but they were never that profitable in the first place making the industry very sensitive to disruption.

Timeline of US reactor construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#/me...

[amarshall]

The problem as I see it is that the costs of Three Mile are acute and fairly direct. Whereas fossil fuel power may have even an even bigger cost (from the environmental impact), but as they are slow, chronic, and indirect, they’re easily overlooked.

Humans just seem to be disproportionately responsive to rare, acute events.

[seadan83]

To "slow, chronic, and indirect", I would also add "spanning most of a human lifespan." For these kinds of things we often don't realize something is brand new as of our lifetime. Said in another way, if something changes in our life when we are 2, we will tend to think that thing was always that way, even though it is very recent.

An example, forest fires in the West (coast US). They have always been around. So, many say, nothing new here. Yet, we don't quite grok that they are 10x worse than 50 years ago [1]. Thus, if you look at it across multiple human lifetimes we can see there is a radical difference. Across one lifetime and it might not seem like it is so different.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/24/climate/fires... (has several graphs that indicate magnitude more fire & magnitude more burn area)

[Retric]

Those differences need to be prices in via Coal taxes or the market doesn’t care.

However, the market does care if something has proven to be a risky bet. Meltdowns involve actual money on the line.

[acjohnson55]

Looks like Chernobyl really killed nuclear.

[Retric]

Compare active reactors + reactors in construction during three mile island vs where nuclear production stabilized.

Things stabilizing like that is very suspect. It probably has to do with capacity factors and the long lead time, but I wouldn’t assume there’s no correlation.

[acjohnson55]

Yeah, I'm not saying there's no correlation, just that you see the full-on halt kick in after Chernobyl. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Even though our reactors were very different from Chernobyl, the incident was so much more extreme and the distinctions were probably largely lost to the general public.

[boringg]

You have it backwards. Industries that are profitable are subject to disruption.

[Retric]

Wrong kind of disruption. If your profit margins are 0.5% then a tiny dip in demand, 2% spike in interest rates, or spike in steel costs etc can be devastating.

If you’re a software company with profit margins over 40% then you don’t care much about rent etc.

[sgustard]

This question sort of answers itself, but why skirt the real concern, just add a "Chance of crashing" filter to the flight search? Bonus jobs for data scientists and takes the consumer out of the odds calculation.

[ren_engineer]

the impact of violence vs other causes of death is similar, 9/11 killed 3K people and we went to war for 20 years and spent trillions as a result. Meanwhile 100K Americans died from opioids last year and the government does nothing

[nmca]

requiring events to kill anyone as evidence of danger of death is a foolish standard, obviously.

People are "bad at statistics" in the sense that the very real evidence coming from, e.g. 3 mile, is hard to bring into statistical models appropriately, not in the sense that there was no evidence there.

[amarshall]

For Three Mile, indeed there is some disagreement on the long-term non-fatal health effects. That any causal effect is unclear does not mean it does not exist, but does suggest that, even if it does, it is likely small. (Admittedly, I have not done a thorough review of the data on this). Nevertheless, your point carries to the true comparison of nuclear power: fossil fuel power and its long-term economic and health impact.

For the airline risk example: US Airline Carriers in past 14 years: 268 serious injuries (same source as above). Depending on the year, that’s about the same or less than the number of road traffic related injuries in the US in just one hour (on average)[1].

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191900/road-traffic-rela...

[Rallen89]

So what are you basing it on if not deaths/flight hours

[j4yav]

Scary news reports per minute

[ejb999]

>>I’m starting to treat general aviation as though it was 50 years ago: Very unsafe and expensive

50 years ago civilian aircraft deaths were, on average, 400% higher per year than now. You might want to rethink your comparison; it has never been safer to fly commercial airlines.

IIRC, less than 5 people have died in the USA in commercial airline crashes since 2010.

[Fatnino]

I'd be willing to bet it was safer to fly right before the 737 MAX was introduced than right now.

Just a gut feeling.

[alex_lav]

Gut feelings are anxieties and biases.

[ejb999]

...and in this case provably wrong - there have been (in the USA) just 2 deaths, in all of commercial aviation, since the 737-max was introduced in 2015 - thats 2 deaths in 9 years.

In the 9 years before (2014 back to 2006) that there were ~100 deaths, so 5000% higher deaths in the 9 years before the 737Max was introduced - and even that is very, very low historically.

(and for the record, not claiming the 737Max is directly responsible for those lower deaths, just that in general - and across the board - aviation has never been safer than it is now).

[Eisenstein]

In 2015 and 2016 there were 0 deliveries of 737 Max's. They were also grounded for a good part of 2019 and you are only counting one country, so your statistics should be revised.

[Fatnino]

Covid makes for a very strange divot in all aviation statistics.

[AndrewKemendo]

Maybe a better way to state my position is that, while it is currently the safest time to fly, I expect regression to the mean for airline safety over the next several decades. To such a degree that the increase in fatality risk is going to go up not down

[cityofdelusion]

General aviation is and always has been unsafe, due to the prevalence of single engine aircraft and unskilled pilots.

Did you mean commercial aviation?

[AndrewKemendo]

Yeah I did. I’m a private pilot so sometimes i mix em up. Thanks

[plussed_reader]

Please qualify 'serious accident' in the wake of 2 crashes and a decompression event forcing landing.

[AndrewKemendo]

My definition:

Everyone on the plane has to die in a way that the plurality of citizens are horrified enough that they can put public pressure on a public figure powerful enough to force structural change

This is the same idea as the cynical idea of “taking advantage of a crisis”

What I’m not saying here is that this is what should happen or that this is how things should happen in a normative way. I’m simply describing that humans make progress almost exclusively in response to disaster rather than proactively preventing it.

[plussed_reader]

So watching the FAA lurch to life after it delegated/abandoned its regulatory mission isn't a horrified response?

Or is that business as usual in your estimation?

[AndrewKemendo]

I’m not really aware of any meaningful change happening so no, seems to be business as usual

[ClumsyPilot]

> plurality of citizens are horrified enough that they can put public pressure on a public figure powerful enough to force structural change

So basically only 9/11 or Perl Harbour would qualify.

[AndrewKemendo]

Great Depression takes the cake here

Pearl Harbor for sure

Ozone Layer hole and the subsequent Montreal Protocol (banning of CFC) was notable in its speed and efficacy

9/11 is questionable - the response was bad and counter productive so I’d say no it doesn’t count

[sixothree]

Those two accidents didn't "happen here" and our news is very isolated from the rest of the world. Maybe that's what he means?

[patmorgan23]

No one died or was seriously injured in the decompression event. But people die in car wrecks on the highway everyday

[plussed_reader]

How does PTSD factor into your empathy radar? Is that not a serious injury and impediment to a life lived unabated?

[sokoloff]

> I’m starting to treat general aviation as though it was 50 years ago: Very unsafe and expensive

General aviation* is expensive and dramatically less safe than commercial aviation. I'm not sure what that has to do with Kayak's offering model-filtering in their UI (Kayak is selling commercial aviation tickets, which has nothing to do with general aviation).

* - Civil aviation, minus commercial air carrier minus aerial application, pipeline patrol, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_aviation

[patmorgan23]

Commercial aviation is incredibly save. Yes there are accidents, but there are accidents in every human system. Commercial aviation is the safest way to travel even with all the mistakes Boeing has been making lately.

You are far more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane.