How the airline industry got wise to seat belts(airspacemag.com) |
How the airline industry got wise to seat belts(airspacemag.com) |
* I won't call it a crash since the aircraft made it to an airport and to a runway. We had equipment failure in flight so there was plenty of time for the flight attendants to review our crash positions, confiscate shoes, move people around etc. Everybody survived and I think everybody survived the emergency slides intact. Very exciting to mid-20s me.
Crashes in commercial planes are so rare that any single one almost always makes the news, while turbulence is extremely common. Let’s be fair and say that a seatbelt is not going to make a whit of difference when colliding with the ground at 200 MPH, so a 2 or 5 point harness are essentially the same in that regard. But a belt is plenty to help with turbulence.
Will there be a few instances, such as yours, where the extra protection would have been good? Of course, but there’s also a trade-off of weight, cost, and public resistance to strapping in like a race car driver. The other mitigations seem to work well enough when there is a situation.
"Accidents on U.S. airlines have become increasingly rare except for one category of in-flight mishap that has remained stubbornly prevalent: turbulence that leads to serious injuries.
More than 65% of severe injuries — or 28 of 43 — logged by U.S. accident investigators from 2017 through 2020 on airliners resulted from planes encountering bumpy skies, triggered by atmospheric conditions that could be worsening due to climate change."
Sure, let's reduce injuries. But 7 serious injuries per year seems quite good already compared to injuries from other forms of transportation. I wonder how many people are injured on shuttle buses to airports that lack seat belts. I'd have to guess it's more than that.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/turbulence-continues-t...
I would like it because I mostly sleep on the plane. Also I take a lot of transoceanic flights (or did pre covid) which seem to have more turbulence than transcontinental ones (perhaps less discretion for rerouting, especially ETOPS flights?).
I miss the back-facing seats which I always chose when I had the option, as they are much safer (except for the risk of flying debris).
I'd think they'd want to make sure your shoes were on, so that you could walk safely over whatever debris was produced.
Isnt it because their seats are facing the other way?
???
That does not change the fact that seat belts save lives, however: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/occupant-protectio...
They fly us around in tin cans at 30,000 feet without killing that many folks per year. I'd love to get status of fatalities per motorcycle mile vs airline mile. Got to be remarkably different.
(airplanes are zero most years)
Data for motorcycles:
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...
Eyeballing, it looks like motorcycles have roughly ~50x as many fatalities per mile as passenger autos.
The DC-10 for instance...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Accide...
I imagine part of the reason people don't fly out of their seats today is, well, seatbelts, but also likely depends on the airline/pilots as well.
They also moved the "old"* people in the exit rows and asked a couple of us young men to take their places. Back then there was no pre-questioning to see if you're willing and able to open the exit windows. Interestingly, they gave us special instruction which was: "Don't open the window unless I [flight attendant] am disabled. I might not be opening it for a reason."
* probably around the age I am now, or younger, and I don't feel old. But I am a lot fitter today than people my age tended to be 30 years ago.
The main reason is knowing which engine is on fire vs shutdown. So in almost all cases you want to captain to decide the moment of evacuation, not the cabin crew and certainly not a passenger.
Supposedly the call for this on the plane would be “Brace! Brace!” Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong before the world shut down.
Motorcycle fatalities are mostly similar to factors that cause car fatalities, but extremely exacerbated.
For example, about 40% of motorcycle fatalities involve alcohol. One drink before riding a motorcycle is about equivalent to 4 before you drive.
Riding at night accounts for a significant amount of fatalities, as does unprotected left turns. Oversteering is another major factor, usually because you went too fast through a turn.
Also, motorcycle fatalities are currently rising. This is largely due to older people who have wanted to ride but couldn't or were afraid to. A 65 year old man on a 800lb 1.5L engine bike who's a new rider is going to take a bad situation a lot harder than a younger person on a smaller bike.
Motorcycles are more dangerous than cars, but if you understand the risks and employ constant self-improvement in your skills, you really begin to reduce your exposure to risk. Unfortunately, it does somewhat select for a group that likes to take risks.
Successful pilots are the opposite personality. They tend to be adventurous in terms of seeking experiences but are able to embrace following strict rules.
There are many breeds of motorcycle rider, as I'm sure there are different breeds of pilot. The pipe and slippers brigade very much embrace following strict rules. In the UK, you'll frequently find them in RoSPA, where they follow the System of Motorcycle Control.
I don't know how true to life the Top Gun cliche of fighter pilot / sportsbike rider is, but anecdotally riding a sportsbike is the closest experience a civilian can get to a fighter plane on the ground.
Motorcycle racers are usually pretty exacting about the mechanical state and safety of their bike, and many top ranked competitive riders never ride on the road, only on track. The hazards on track vs on road are almost completely different.
Amateur stunters, weekend warriors and young squids are more likely matches to the cliche I think you have in mind: thrill-seekers who dabble but not particularly serious about it.
They don't attract reckless people. But what happens, you get used to the speed, the risk, the cornering - and so yes, you start going faster and faster. Problem is - hitting something at 100 on a bike, even just a little something on road - can be seriously game over. I stopped riding (kid / wife etc).
Being a good driver does a ton to insulate you from the shenanigans of
Equipment failure is basically a rounding errors but also within the driver's control since "flat tire at speed" is probably lion's share of crashes in that category.
One thing that's different between GA and driving is that you could stop driving. An hour from home, realising that the road really is too treacherous, you could pull over and walk. Up in the sky they don't have that option at a moment's notice. But one thing that's exactly the same is mission mindset - people fixate on what they intended to do until after it's far too late rather than have contingency plans.
https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
I don't think flying is particularly dangerous but the person you're replying to is being highly naive or misleading by taking that chart at face value.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/13/colgan-air-crash-10-years-ag...
This isn't a problem in airline flights. There are very specific rules about when you can and cannot depart and when an alternate airport and fuel for it is required. No airline takes off without satisfying all the rules and almost no airline cancels a flight for weather while the rules say it could go.
General Aviation is a category that covers a circumstance of flying rather than of aircraft. I think if you've got the necessary time and money to buy your own personal jetliner, insure it, get all the paperwork signed off for it and for you to fly it as a hobby, that's still GA, although where somebody with that much time on their hands gets that kind of money escapes me.
Some mere millionaires own jets with decent performance, aircraft that in capable hands could fly well in most weather but they're still GA and too many of them still die in bad weather.
They also tend to be less well maintained, and the other participants less trained.
I'm not sure why I was downvoted, because I'm just stating I'd like to understand (data/studies) instead of people's anecdotes and opinions, including my own.
My intuition is that car travel has a constant level of risk, whereas plane travel has a level of risk much below that when everything is good but (I'm guessing here) that risk goes much higher than the constant risk of car travel when something goes wrong (failure, human mistake, crash, birds, weather, etc.). I've searched for it before and didn't find anything, but it'd be nice to see any studies that confirm or deny this.
The main difference is when a car has a catastrophic failure there’s a good chance the people involved survive.
I've had an engine failure in my car while driving it. I simply was able to slow to a crawl until I got home. I don't think engine failure on an airplane is such an anti-climatic event, on average.
It often is, actually. They have more than one engine precisely for that scenario, and can fly quite well with one down. Flights over water are also carefully planned based on distance to the nearest airport with an engine out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS
Even if you lose all four on a 747, there’s surprisingly large amounts of time to troubleshoot if you’re at cruise.
For example, if a turning vehicle cuts off oncoming traffic, it could get hit. An attentive driver in the oncoming lane might see the problem and hit the brakes, while an inattentive or speeding driver might not react in time. The turning vehicle is at fault, but that doesn't mean they were the only one that could have prevented the collision.
There are sometimes events you cannot control, but a lot of those multi-vehicle collisions were preventable by either party.
While I have no hard stats I would also assume that a plane is much safer when something goes wrong. Why?
1) Professional 'driver' who has trained for years to handle risks and failure scenarios and practices these on a regular basis.
2) Redundancy and graceful failure is designed into many of the components and systems on a plane, while cars tend towards the cheapest component or system possible unless mandated by law.
3) Space (both altitude and the fact that the sky is basically empty) provides time to solve some problems before they become catastrophic failures and makes other classes of problems very unlikely.
If you blow a tire, run into a deer, or have a transmission failure while you are cruising down the highway at 80mph you have seconds (at most) to react and respond. If a plane hits birds, has an engine fail, or loses some other system they usually have minutes to troubleshoot the problem and redundant systems that prevent the plane from just falling out of the sky.
When they happen all you do it move over and come to a stop. Unless you go Full Redditor(TM) and start adding a bunch of extreme control inputs none of these things are that bad. They don't require much reaction at all even if you are paralyzed by indecision it can still turn out fine since all you have to do is stop.
Blowouts are a non-event, IMO, just a flat tire with an extra audio alert.
Automatic transmissions basically don't fail in unsafe ways. Worst case you'll find some extra neutrals and make an ass out of yourself failing to merge or something. Splitting the case on a manual (like you might do if you go for 4th and somehow find 2nd, or jump a vehicle and don't mash the clutch before hitting the ground) is surprisingly uneventful from a maintaining control perspective.
Deer suck, mostly because they tend to break a bunch of expensive cosmetic bits.
Having a hood fly up on you is worse than any of the above events because you can't see. Brake failure kinda sucks too, especially with an automatic trans.
