[abofh]

You hear about the coincidences that work out, you're unlikely to hear about the pilot who was a professional glider who landed his regular flight at Dulles.

Thousands of planes in the air every day, that one with engine failure has a pilot who practices without engines isn't surprising. I'd be more surprised if he was a skilled mechanic who repaired the engine in situ.

[pavel_lishin]

> You hear about the coincidences that work out, you're unlikely to hear about the pilot who was a professional glider who landed his regular flight at Dulles.

But it's also amazing just how few fatal air crashes there are! I know that the FAA is pretty incredible at their job, but there just aren't that many incidents of planes going down and killing everyone on board - and out of those few bad incidents, having two where everything lined up perfectly feelsl weird!

[pfdietz]

This is illustrated by another thing discussed on the UA 232 wikipedia page.

There were some "lap children" on the flight, some of whom died in the crash. So it was proposed that all children be in their own seats on commercial flights. This regulation was in place for less than a decade before being revoked. The reason? Economists estimated that because this would raise the cost of a family flying, it would encourage some to drive instead of flying -- and for every 1 life saved by the regulation, it would cost 60 lives due to the much more dangerous driving.

[dghlsakjg]

I hear this story all the time, but would love to see a source. The FAA takes flight safety seriously, but one thing they famously don’t do is listen to outside expertise. Anyone vaguely familiar with their medical approval process can tell you that.

[pfdietz]

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/child_safety-Clau...