[JumpinJack_Cash]

Meanwhile you can carry a nuclear bomb on a train and nobody even bothers to check the id or ticket up until you are on board.

Irrational fear of flight strikes again, it's a very long list actually of standards that aviation has to comply with in order not to thrive but to merely exist , all because people are irrationally fearful about being suspended mid air.

It's the same thing for nuclear

[ash_091]

A train can go from "cruising speed" to letting passengers off to escape a fire in about a minute.

A plane might take anywhere from five minutes to several hours to be able to safely let passengers out.

Personally I feel that's a good enough reason to impose more robust restrictions on Things Which May Cause Fire on planes compared to trains. Especially in the case of lithium batteries where they're more or less impossible to extinguish one they're going.

[zamadatix]

I agree with the concept of comparing risk being the meaningful approach, but I disagree this is how you go about measuring risk. How many people are being injured/killed per million km or something is the type of metric. Air travel far exceeds those types of metrics vs other common modes of travel, yet is always the first one to be further focused on how bad it could potentially be.

[appreciatorBus]

I would argue at the performance of aviation safety, and the constant focus on how bad it could be, is exactly why aviation is safe. The day that we decide to stop focussing on what could go wrong, is the day that aviation stops being safe.

For example, if aircraft come within five nautical miles or I think it’s 1000 vertical feet, it’s considered a very serious incident. Not because anyone is in danger at five nautical miles or 1000 vertical feet, but because if you don’t draw the line there, and treat that barrier as seriously as if two aircraft had collided, then there isn’t really a barrier at all.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

> > The day that we decide to stop focussing on what could go wrong, is the day that aviation stops being safe

A rebalancing vis a vis cars, buses, ships and trains is due. All the effort and man hours wasted trying to clear the last 0.01% in aviation would be better spent focusing on the other means of transportation, or other stuff that actually kills people period. The goal is not to die period. Not avoiding dying of aviation crash, and planes are about the last culprit as far as stuff that kills people worldwide on a yearly basis.

They are far behind dogs, actually my intuition says that they are behind a very calm and friendly breed such as German Shepherds, they are calm and friendly alright but as far as dog breeds worldwide for sure they kill > 200 people yearly.

I'd board a 95% plane if it means that once landed I could step on a 95% safe train or bus. Or a 95% safe city for that matter , Instead now the values are:

Plane : 99.9999999% safe

Train: 80% safe depending on the city and amount of crime in subway

Bus : 70% safe again depending on the city and amount of crime

City as a whole: Between crime, 6000 puounds vehicles speeding through the streets etc...I guess much less than 70%

The cognitive dissonance of people living in urban hells where crime is rampant and risk of death from assault , robbery or outright murder and then being afraid of flying tells you all you need to know. And no, it doesn't happen solely in Africa....San Francisco is a good example of that.

[appreciatorBus]

Are you seriously suggesting the 20% of train trips and 30% of bus trips and in death or injury?

Big if true!

[JumpinJack_Cash]

On a global basis yes, they end up with injury or theft or molesties or attempt at such

[zamadatix]

Naturally it's why it's so much safer, but the options for air travel safety most certainly aren't uniquely only between "as safe as possible" or "not safe at all". It should be no different than how we weigh safety regulation for any other mode of travel, and this kind of "either we do everything possible or we won't have safety" instead of focusing purely on what the measured target should be and how we currently measure against it is precisely the irrationality around it.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

It's holding the global economy back actually who cares about the global economy...it's holding our personal happiness by making flight more expensive than it should be.

If I want to fly somewhere I already know that once I land there I face a considerable risk when I get in the metropolis. Risk of illness, violence, assault etc. Some metropolis are worse and some are better but the risk is always there.

The plane is the least of my problems.

The monopoly of aircraft production and the fact that planes can be used everywhere in the world is forcing us to withstand the same level of risk tolerance as the U.S. , and not even avg U.S citizen....for obvious reasons due to what happened theatrically some 25 years ago the risk tolerance of aviation is forced to be the same as Billionaire's Row , Central Park West , NYC, NY and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.

On the other hand...trains get to do this and nobody cares because they are local not global:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsN5_NoffsY

The FAA and the FDA are enemies of progress

[TylerE]

I disagree with there being no danger at 5nm.

Depending on courses and speeds that 5nm could go to zero in as little as 16 seconds or so. Airliners are not especially maneuverable.

Yes, the odds of the courses actually intersecting are small, but not zero.

[appreciatorBus]

Yes, of course that’s my point. We have to draw large safety margins around these systems, and then we have to treat incidents that breach those margins as seriously as we would an actual collision.

[Wistar]

I have, for a while now, wondered when an airborne battery incident will be calamitous enough for a complete ban on power banks.

[abenga]

There was one accident, but it was a pallet of batteries on a cargo plane that killed the crew.

[Krssst]

Uncontrolled fire in a plane is almost certain death if you don't land within minutes. You cannot land once the fire takes out the cables necessary for flight controls. Airplanes can still operate until landing after various mistreatments but uncontrolled fire is not one of them.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

What are the odds that a lithium battery would cause uncontrolled fire? We are around them daily, ever since the 80s-90s , to this day I have never seen one in person.

Look at this guy, he puts a screwdriver through phones for show off on youtube, intentionally damaging the battry...nothing dangerous or uncontrolled happens, the little smoke is the equivalent of a couple of cigarettes.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gcjfJfbOVkY

And all the psychological tests on pilots, no train or bus pilot has to go through the same stuff even though they have a similar number of souls on board

I'll go to my grave claiming that aviation has to fight for its existence on a daily basis by clearing impossible standards because people are scared , intuitively scared of flight as humans aren't supposed to be able to do that and all our ancestors who tried failed miserably by falling off a tree or something.

The percentage of people who get the physics of why a plane flies are less than 1% of those who ever flew, and that is not even the majority of the 9 billion humans yet, hell not even a quarter.

"If your phone falls through the seats DON'T TRY TO RECOVER IT as the seat (which is fixed) might damage it and cause a fire" lmao

Next thing they'd be making announcements on how to seat as a particularly fat individual missing their seat could land on their ass and fall through the fusolage causing a decompression...give me a break

[icehawk]

Non-zero:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6

> The report indicated that the fire was caused by the autoignition of the contents of a cargo pallet that contained more than 81,000 lithium batteries and other combustible materials

[an0malous]

So we just need to limit to 80,999 power banks on a plane at once

[abenga]

Aviation rules are written in blood. Everything you snidely dismiss actually happened and people died/came close to dying, so the rule was added.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

What about all other means of transportation?

Is the blood shed by aviation more red or more special then?

It's not, it's the fact that the whole concept of flight goes against human intuition so it will always feel fishy and unsafe , even though the physics is much sounder and I'd say even safer than all other forms of transportation

[IAmBroom]

Speaking for rail safety alone: rules are written in hypothetical blood. The FRA and similar bodies in CAN and EU are VERY proactive about safety, as are the light rail train companies themselves.

In fact, new safety regs are often suggested by rail companies, who observe previously-unexpected situations IRL (despite the best attempts to nail these down in advance).

You're enjoying tossing around a lot of "What if"s, out of ignorance, but modern transit safety is not based on some dude sitting around and thinking up rules for funsies. It's a highly intensive engineering process, with multiple layers of cross-checking.

And then millions of us get behind the wheel, and there's nothing anyone can do about decisions made by each of them. Car safety is based on the hope people fear getting tickets, and some soft design aids.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

> > Speaking for rail safety alone: rules are written in hypothetical blood. The FRA and similar bodies in CAN and EU are VERY proactive about safety, as are the light rail train companies themselves.

Trains make thousands of victims each year, I think worldwide the number borders the 10,000 from all causes and nobody gets on their case like planes which in a good year make 0 victims per year worldwide

So you have it the other way around, the hypotetical blood is the aviation one and the real blood is the one shed by trains and yet the scare factor is all on planes

[abenga]

There are reasons more than a million people die on the roads every year, but that number only cracks a thousand for commercial aviation in particularly bad years. Most of those reasons are that all aviation incidents and accidents are analyzed to inform how the industry operates, but for road accidents we just shrug and say, "people die in accidents, whatever can we do?"

[JumpinJack_Cash]

Exaclty. And this is fucking wrong and insane because the goal of a human should be not to die, not to avoid a particular type of death (eg. aviation death) . It's not like if you die on the car drive to the airport or because you are stabbed in the subway it's okay because you respawn

This is the same cognitive failure that happens with

Sharks v. Mosquitos and

Nuclear v. Fossil fuels

It seems to me you are defending the cognitive failure instead of arguing for the re-establishment of risk/reward parity also considering the enormous benefits of aviation which enables us to get from one point of the globe to the opposite in less than a day

[cameldrv]

Did you see in the article that picture of the Air Busan plane from last year? The one without the roof? That incident happened on the ground as they were getting ready for takeoff. If that were the middle of the ocean, those people would all be dead.

[poemxo]

Most people don't have nuclear bombs.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

Yes but what I mean is that nobody checks anything

[IAmBroom]

You haven't flown in the US in the last 24 years.

[JumpinJack_Cash]

I meant on train dude, try to follow the discourse

[YokoZar]

Citation needed