It also should be considered that accidents depend on chance. It is completely fine to point out that aviation has gained an enormous standard of safety, which is the result of around of a hundred years of constant vigilance and self improvement of the industry.
Nevertheless a commercial airliner, recently produced, lost a door mid flight. Under less fortunate circumstances that could have been a major disaster and the statistic would look very different.
I think the worry people have is that safety standards are slipping, when it comes to building airplanes, specifically Boeing building airplanes. This is not something that would be noticeable in an accident statistic while it is actually happening, yet it is an extremely serious matter for the safety of aviation in the future.
This exactly. Looking at the safety record to make predictions about airline safety in the future is like making a bet in 2006 that subprime mortgages should be rated AAA because the price of real estate is always increasing. The real characteristics of what lies beneath the numbers matter.
I believe you just made the author's point. The door thing was an issue but in reality it was an incredibly minor issue considering the scale of the industry involved and the incredible reliability we now take for granted. Oh, and the fact that nobody died. Over and over again people are fixating on the door issue because there is basically nothing else to point at. As soon as anything even minor happens panic sets in and it is irrational given the safety record the industry has worked very hard to achieve. There 'could have been' a major disaster on any flight last year, but there wasn't. If we play the 'could have been' game we will always give in to fear and panic. The fact is there wasn't. And there hasn't been for a long time. The author is right to point out that, unfortunately, there will actually be a major event some time in the future but that is because nothing is perfect. In the grand scheme of things though, the airline industry safety record is about as perfect as something can be right now so please stop panicking.
That is a very condescending reponse. Auditing the procedures and documenting the problems is not panicking. Such methodical analysis is largely the opposite of panicking.
You are looking at a very superficial trailing indicator, the number of accidents.
While that's an important consideration, it is not very useful in terms of predicting future events.
Given that we now know that procedures are not being followed and records are not being kept, this tells us that the quality standards have slipped abysmally. That does not result in more accidents in the short term, but largely guarantees them in the longer term.
Boeing is equivalent to a software company with a great track record of not having security vulnerabilities who decides to get rid of the entire security team since nothing is happening and then patting themselves on the back quarter after quarter for all the money they save. Of course, we know the quality will be slipping and slipping and by the time the first vulnerability is exploited a few years later the codebase will be so riddled with holes that there might be no way to recover.
My argument, and I believe that of the article, is not about how the industry is handling this but instead how people and the press are handling this. Right now the industry, via regulations and internal pressures, is digging deep into Boeing and the entire culture that allowed this one thing to happen. I have not once argued this is a bad thing. I am continuing to argue that the level of reporting and public reactions deserve the title of 'panic' since they, to me, meet an irrational fear level given the safety track record of the industry as a whole. I encourage you to re-read my comment and tell me where I said the industry should ignore this. People and the press are panicking. The industry is reacting in a sane, well rehearsed and ultimately successful way.
> The door thing was an issue but in reality it was an incredibly minor issue considering the scale of the industry involved and the incredible reliability we now take for granted. Oh, and the fact that nobody died.
Rapid cabin depressurization is in fact a major issue for obvious reasons. The fact that no one died was a matter of luck (not at a super high altitude yet, no one sitting directly next to the door, seatbelt light still on, etc.)
The fact that airlines found many loose/missing bolts on doors in other 737s indicates that Boeing has a QC problem that could lead to future accidents. Systemic QC problems at a major plane manufacturer with aircraft components that are essential to maintaining pressurization is a major issue. The FAA is certainly treating it as such.
The 737 MAX has already been involved in multiple relatively recent fatal crashes. One went down killing everybody on board in 2018, and the same thing happened in 2019. And the scale is quite small. The total number of the entire 737 MAX series craft is less than 1500. [1] That's an extremely high ratio of these craft having errors, including catastrophic. Also, those planes were grounded for some time after the crashes, and air travel rates also plummeted during COVID. So we're only relatively recently getting back to normalcy on that front, and the craft are back to showing their worth.
After the Boeing whistleblower “killed himself”, I’ve just gotta assume anyone who has anything positive to say about Boeing either has a red dot on their forehead or a financial incentive (or both!).
Man, I really wish they were paying me but no, not a cent. I think it is just time that we stop allowing people to get away with panic as an unchecked response. The stats in the industry are incredibly clear. The article is about how clearly safe the industry is and how we are fixated on a statistically insignificant thing and I totally agree with it. If you deeply believe there is a massive issue with safety in the industry because a door came off then I highly urge you to look at other industries and apply the same level of scrutiny to them. We need the level of safety aviation has in cars, healthcare and industry. something like over 30k people died in cars in the US last year. Studies suggest hundreds of thousands of deaths a year due to medical malpractice and over a hundred thousand due to industrial air pollution alone. But I guess the 'severe' quality control issues at Boeing really do indicate that the aviation industry is in a safety crisis and the 0 deaths last year on major airlines completely back that up. Definitely no irrational panic involved when people go after a door issue for months in the aviation world but don't care about those 30+k road deaths or how massively terrible our healthcare stats are.
The investigation of criminal misconduct at Boeing is not a panic response. It is serious. The company is run by actual criminals who knowingly and wilfully defrauded US regulators and ignore safety/quality concerns raised by inspectors who work at the company.
Boeing's MCAS fraud caused two complete losses within a few months. The carnage only stopped when regulators forcibly grounded all 737 Max globally while Boeing continued to deny any issues with the airplane design and blamed the pilots.
If someone was sitting next to that window they would have been sucked out and killed.
The airplane safety record is relatively good DESPITE the criminals running the show at Boeing who are actively against safety.
You're not a Boeing shill but in one paragraph you use 1) ad hominems about people's panic and "rationality", 2) whataboutisms of the form "but flu killed more people than Covid", 3) straw argumentation about the specific reason for a massive issue with safety in Boeing (not "in the industry", etc).
So, effectively the same level of critical argumentation as a Boeing shill.
Actually, your ideological point is really that "Boeing does some things right, let's learn from them" which is fine but doesn't let Boeing off the hook.
I didn't defend Boeing, I defended the industry and its practices. Boeing needs to fix issues and the process I am defending is making them do that right now. I define panic as irrational fear. Irrational fear here is backed up by stats showing safety compared to industries with massively worse records than aviation that aren't experiencing nearly the reaction this one incident is having. Basically you have just thrown big words around and ignored the arguments presented. Present an argument and I will listen.
The clear salient point both I and, I believe, the article are making is that aviation is safe stop obsessing to the detriment of aviation over every inevitable issue that happens. Bad things will happen when hundreds of millions of people move billions of miles every year. It is unfortunate but the best safety conscious industry in the world is handling it. The fact that 0 died in the US on major airlines for the last ? how many years now? shows the incredible safety record of the industry. Obsessing over a door when you don't even care that several people in your city likely died in car accidents last year is the definition of panic.
> There 'could have been' a major disaster on any flight last year
One would think there is a slightly more risk of a major disaster for flights where the door plugs haven't been properly attached, compared to others. But I guess you've looked into the numbers in order to make the strong claims you make in your comment.
> can be right now so please stop panicking.
Just because people write about this whole thing doesn't mean people are panicking, so please stop trying to stop people from doing something they probably aren't even doing in the first place.
I think there are two different issues: the maintenance and piloting standards have dramatically increased over last decades.
Meanwhile, people are afraid that the manufacturer standards which have been very high since the 80s are starting to slip, with very new planes having problems.
And to fixating at door issue... isn't MCAS debacle still relatively new?
>The door thing was an issue but in reality it was an incredibly minor issue considering the scale of the industry involved and the incredible reliability we now take for granted.
No. This is a major issue, because it demonstrates that the safety protections which have been built into the industry can actually fail on such a basic level. There has been an enormous amount of work to try to make sure that Airplanes never miss critical components of their structure. Failing to install a bolt isn't one mistake it is dozens of mistakes which need to have happened and which show that the overall mistake rate has to be high.
If the door at failed at a different point, if the seating had been different, then there would have been deaths.
Actually, it wasn't. There is no perfect system. There is always some imperfect crack. To expect perfection and point and say the sky is falling when something minor happens is actually counterproductive. That attitude is likely to force the system to change and the current system's safety is a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Panic is likely to lead to forcing random change that actually could hurt the system's safety. I wish instead of constantly focusing on the rare safety issue the industry has we instead dug deep into what has enabled this industry to achieve this level of safety in the hopes we could apply it to the large number of vastly less successful industries out there. Cars, trains, industrial workplaces, etc etc. All of these could possibly benefit from the aviation industry if we could understand the factors that drove it to this level of safety.
Letting one of the most basic of errors slip through proves that the currently existing system has failed. There is no way around it. The current safety standards are the result of past behavior and will not continue with the current system.
Making sure bolts are installed is the most basic of basic things. If that can fail, many, many far more complex and involved problems are also failing. If you understand how safety in aviation works you would understand that this slipping through can only happen if many, many more things are also slipping through. Things which are far harder to inspect and to verify to assure flight safety.
The article is clear and I agree with it, and so do the stats. Airline safety is in the ridiculously safe category. The point of the article, and stats that are easily looked up, is that there have been 0 deaths this year on major airlines but despite that a door blew out and people are loosing their minds, for months. Put this energy into figuring out how this industry has been so incredibly successful at safety so that we can apply that to cars, medicine, industry or basically any other place because airlines are s-a-f-e and the fear and panic people are driving right now because of a door is actually likely to make things worse and not better. I love aviation. I spent a large chunk of my life dedicated to it but we can't innovate even one little bit because a door broke off meanwhile we drive by fatal accidents on the road all the time. Most people know people that have died in a car accident and many have even been in near fatal accidents but there is no panic, fear or months long panic in national media over the 30k+ deaths on the road every year. I'm not blithe. I am actually mad. I -love- flying but we are devastating the industry with panic to the great loss of everyone. Go ahead, keep hyping the fear and drive people from the skies and onto the roads so that they can actually be in danger.
The discussion above was about what makes you blithe and fact-free, which I implicitly agreed with the other commenter was the case, and so, yes, the age of your account is one way how people sanity-check for trolls and shills, which is relevant to having a "discussion" at all.
Yes. Boeing is great. Boeing is a-m-a-z-i-n-g. They prioritize quality and safety above profit. No issues at Boeing management, whatsoever. Ignore the whistleblowers. Bunch of liars.
> I think the worry people have is that safety standards are slipping, when it comes to building airplanes, specifically Boeing building airplanes. This is not something that would be noticeable in an accident statistic while it is actually happening, yet it is an extremely serious matter for the safety of aviation in the future.
yeah airline safety in a year can be a lagging indicator. and the airlines are safe due to the safety regulations being respected and issues being broadcasted rather than in spite of it
I think the worry people have is that safety standards are slipping, when it comes to building airplanes, specifically Boeing building airplanes. This is not something that would be noticeable in an accident statistic while it is actually happening, yet it is an extremely serious matter for the safety of aviation in the future.