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by joering2
4477 days ago
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The issue here is a monetary one. How many planes go down each year? A few. How many planes are never found (black boxes). One per 10-15 years? An airline, or a company that builds planes would have little to none problem explaining to the judge that benefit-cost analyse make no sense: too much money would be spent for too little benefit (I know lives may be at stake, but that won't convince the judge). Couple years ago I read an interesting article about the way Boeing builds their wings and the way petrol compartments are organized inside such a wing. It went on to explain that in particular external conditions of air, at particular speeds, with particular climbing angle and with particular temperature of aircraft coat, there is a chance of petrol ignition. The only "problem" is that according to their calculation, the probability of all conditions being right is 1:17,000,000. While re-engineering the wing and then applying changes to each aircraft would go north of a billion dollars. Therefore, they have not upgraded their aircrafts and no authority went after them surely because of tiny chance of an accident occurring. We are all flying a ticking time bomb to some extent. The chances of something going wrong are comparable to putting a parrot before your keyboard. How much time will it take a parrot to hit a combination of keys writing "parrot". It may be one billion years! Or five minutes... |
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What lives are at stake? An enhanced black box won't prevent accidents, and, with very few exceptions, it won't help us find out the cause of accidents. I think your take on the "cost-benefit" analysis made the most sense.
Your 1 in 17 million scenario is interesting - how many times per flight is that scenario evaluated, or is that per flight? If per flight, and suppose we have about 20,000 Boeing flights a day, then we would have a Boeing explosion every 3 years. (Adjust the numbers based on how many Boeing flights there are) - I would say it's worthwhile making the change there.