With the recent crash of the Nepalese airplane, I saw a lot of comments on :reddit-logo: talking about how Nepal has poor safety standards, bad piloting certifications, and how they buy second to third hand planes that they don’t maintain.
I’m sure that has nothing to do with capitalism.
But I also saw comments about how Euro and American standards are much, much better. I’m sure that’s true to some extent, given how many airplanes fly over these regions with so few incidents. But… I don’t really see why.
Wouldn’t the center of capitalism be more aggressive with its cost-cutting measures and safety shortcuts? It would improve their profit margins and given the Tendency, they have to take every chance they get, right?
Are we just waiting for a huge, huge sudden spike in airplane crashes as these measures start catching up?
Or is government regulation (and enforcement) still somehow strong in this industry?
This is so scary. I really don’t know what to say. It was what I was afraid of.
Planes are still extremely safe as of now. Plane crashes are kinda like terrorist attacks in that they're very, very rare, but people are scared of them because of how spectacular they are when they do happen and the media coverage they get.
The media coverage they get is kind of a testament to how safe they are. Nobody gives a shit if a family of 4 dies in a car accident because it happens basically every day, but a plane crash? Now that's an event.
As of right now, there's no need to be afraid when going on a plane. They still have a morbillion safety precautions in place, have 2 trained pilots in charge and are supervised by like 20 people at the airports. A lot of people need to fuck up at the same time for any issues to occur, and even more people need to fuck up at the same time for a harrowing plane crash to happen that will make the news.
It's not a "real danger". The odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 11 million (for comparison, odds of dying in a car accident are 1 in 5000). That's somewhere in the ballpark of getting struck by lightning.
Edit: I know this isn't exactly what the thread was about, the concern about airplane safety under capitalism is warranted, I just wanted to calm people with flight anxiety down a bit.
I have a lot of flight anxiety, despite needing to fly semi-regularly. Thanks for your comment :soviet-heart:
I have horrible flight anxiety, and post pandemic its a lot worse, mostly because I know this stuff.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-24296544
These planes can fly themselves fairly well, the pilots can be worked basically to death and the planes still won't go down fwiw. To the best of my knowledge, plane accidents are far more in the hands of the mechanics, then in second place the engineers, then in third place the operators.
There's a ton of approaches/airports that the planes cant auto-land. The Nepal case seems to be on approach, as they were fairly low already. I was seeing someone from Nepal saying how their geography also makes flying in general a much bigger challenge. You have smaller runways, high elevation, geographical features in the way, etc.
Yeah it’ll fly itself out of gas . Autopilot is automation, it doesn’t do anything it isn’t made to do by the pilots, it can’t make decisions, it’s a fancy cruise control.
Aviation accidents are by far more caused by pilot error than mechanical malfunction with big portion of them being a result of over reliance on automation and forgetting how to fly the airplane by hand
You're right, it looks like pilot error is responsible for a little over a majority of all incidents. I'm biased, I'm in engineering and I usually see a problem like "the plane took off without being pressurized" from your Wikipedia post and think "some dumbass team allowed a plane that can take off without being automatically set to pressurize the cabin" and not "the crew forgot to set the cabin to pressurize". It depends on how you slice it, but whoever makes the reports calls it an issue with the pilots and crew.
Are we just waiting for a huge, huge sudden spike in airplane crashes as these measures start catching up?
Pilots' unions are rejecting their latest contracts because airlines are desperately trying to make it so they can fly planes with only one pilot at a time. So if labor continues to be crushed, we're absolutely going to see a spike in crashes.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/08/pilo-n08.html
One of the main factors driving pilots’ opposition is the issue of fatique. During the month of June, there were quadruple the usual number of fatigue-related pilot call-ins at American Airlines. Pilots are directly responsible for the safety of flights and are obligated to report to work fit for duty, which means using their own sick leave if they feel they cannot perform their duties up to standard on a particular day.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires a minimum rest period of nine hours between shifts for pilots, who are also limited to 30 hours of flight time per week. But when the commute to work, meals and other life requirements are added into the equation, this leaves little time for uninterrupted sleep and sabotages workers’ abilities to follow their FAA-mandated training to avoid fatigue on their own time.
Edit - "Fatique" is a great typo, and I've decided that it's really a neologism meant to describe when you're exhausted and piqued in equal measure.
But when the commute to work, meals and other life requirements are added into the equation, this leaves little time for uninterrupted sleep
You would think that the airports would furnish accommodations for pilots that need sleep and don't have time to get to a hotel.
It's pretty obvious that air travel rides on its "it's more dangerous to drive to the airport than to fly on a plane" safety reputation, which remains true. Once that is lost, then the whole thing will spiral out very quickly.
…that’s a connection I didn’t even think of.
All these airplane makers are basically weapon manufacturers who make airplanes on the side…
That is so fucking dystopian.
WHAT THE FUCK.
IS THAT WHY THEY STILL MAKE US USE THOSE SHITTY CALCULATORS????
Well the market for "dumb" calculators will never go away because letting kids use their smartphones on math tests will end up with everyone using Wolfram Alpha and never actually learning math again.
Nah that’s just bs cuz schools are too lazy to try to innovate and prolly get money from TI.
I'd rather use a dumb calculator that works and doesn't spew ads at me when I'm trying to integrate something
On the one hand, big planes are very, very safe.
On the other, small planes (anything with a single engine especially) are not.
On the third hand, even for big planes there's downwards pressure (because capitalism is in the process of eating itself) on maintenance standards that's only being held at bay by institutional memory and the fact planes have now crashed in pretty much every way it is possible to crash and are designed to not do those things.
How good are pilots/air staff at fixing anything that goes wrong mid air?
Very very. Competition to become a commercial pilot is stiff, super expensive, and training requirements are very focused on impossible failures and what to do. You also spend a long time as Co-Pilot and a long time working your way up the airlines and planes to the major carriers. Anyone piloting an Airbus 380 is very, very, good at what they do and have sacrificed money, relationships, and ordinary sanity over decades to fly it over all other things.
Much like train drivers and musicians, a concerning number of Pilots have commercial flight simulator setups as their primary hobby. They go home, and then they fly more.
Honestly I'd probably trust a major commercial pilot to fly the Space Shuttle over a military one (That said many military pilots become commercial pilots.)
Well it really depends. Could be anything from broken in flight entertainment system to structural failure. Also depends on when it happens. Generally the higher up the better, except for fires.
I would say that in the vast, vast majority of mechanical or electrical failures, the worst case scenario is the plane gets written off and you get a few bruises. Critical systems have multiple redundancies built into them and if they all fail at once, you're having a really bad day.
We all know the 737 Max fiasco, but inherent design flaws have been pretty rare this century. You just have to trust that the mechanics know what they're doing. The biggest cause of accidents is pilot error.
Sorry for the confusion I was just using it as an example of a minor issue. Although hypothetically if you out a lot of tvs in the wrong place you could cause a center of gravity issue which could lead to a stall.
Aviation nerds will note that technically speed has nothing to do with it, but as a corollary anything that makes the plane go slower and the nose go higher increases the risk of a stall.
With most modern airliners it is almost impossible to put it into a stall situation. I believe the ATR 72 plane in this crash had a "stick-pusher" to physically stop you from pulling the nose up any higher, requiring about 70lbs of force to overcome.
Small plane accidents are more due to the demographics than their designs. With GA in the US it's basically the same 5 mistakes over and over again and we keep making them. It's just that the folks who think it's fine to fly right through a thunderstorm don't tend to make it to the airlines.
Yes, that's true, but there's also the fact that an Airbus 380 is just inherently going to have a better time in said thunderstorm for the same reason it's better to be on the Queen Mary in a storm instead of the world's best built ocean racing yacht.
True. It's about knowing the limits of the plane. Plenty of bourgeois boomers get themselves and their families killed every year with their macho attitudes.
Dw, I'm fairly certain most, if not all of the large commercial airplane crashes this century have all been ClA for various reasons
Like serious, almost all of them have been flights from/to China. They're clearly getting rid of large numbers of valuable human assets on those planes. The Malaysia one in particular has been confirmed to have a ton of important figures working in the Chinese SEMICONDUCTOR industry
This would explain why there are so less accidents over USA and Europe as well
The entire concept of conspiracy theories was literally invented by the ClA to discredit people discovering their ops
You are :fedposting:
Probably not
I originally responded that way because I don't think the circumstantial evidence you brought up is enough to support your claim.
Oh, that's true. There's a lot more though for the Malaysia flight
I don't have sources off the top of my head but if you want to research more here's what I remember:
Plane never found except for some scraps right after the crash. One person found a scrap of the plane many years after the crash but was conveniently killed soon afterwards and was unable to deliver the piece that he found
Lots of weird things with the black box and flight path. Some people on islands claim they saw the plane gently land in some deserted area near the crash
Also, getting rid of important Chinese people whenever the opportunity presents itself is a favorite pasttime of USA. The embassy in Serbia. Huawei CTO kidnapped in Canada. Two engineers working on B&R suicide bombed in Pakistan
I'm open to believing this, and I might not even be surprised, but, on the other hand, isn't a commercial plane a pretty large sample of people, skewed toward the sorts of people who fly more often? I'm not sure how unlikely it is that a random plane crash will have some passengers who are potential CIA targets.
The FAA is pretty strict. But there are incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administration#Lax_regulatory_oversight
Hang around r/aviationmaintenance/ for a while.
Nepal = hot and high. Air's less dense. Degraded performance. Mountains everywhere and approaches are a nightmare. I'm sure Europe wouldn't fare much better if everyone had to land in the Alps.
The Nepal crash seems to be a stall-spin accident. More common in primary training but not unheard of in the airline world. Usually with the airliners it's a case of how you are trained to deal with a stall. Minimum loss of altitude is still heavily emphasized in some places. Instinct to keep the nose up = bad things coming. It wouldn't have mattered in this case anyway, that close to the ground there's zero chance of recovery.
Ultimately I think this particular accident isn't the victim of the usual Nepalese circumstances but rather another case of disorientation a la Air France 447 and the Colgan Air flight from 2009.
There's really nothing to add here other than "don't stall the plane". I wouldn't worry about it, it's still exceptionally rare in the airline world.
I can't be sure because I don't have access to the flight recorders, but the scenarios I'm most familiar with are:
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Overshooting the runway centerline. Steep bank to correct course, nose up to tighten the turn. This has been nicknamed the "deadly turn". Very dangerous situation, you're supposed to abort if this happens. Increasing the bank leads to an increase in the angle of the wing to the wind, bringing it closer to the stall, which if you don't do something it will. That close to the ground it's over.
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Wing icing the systems can't handle. Wing doesn't want to fly anymore, and you're just in for the ride at that point.
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This is, I think, the most likely scenario. Pulled the power back and simply forgot to put it back in. Nose has to keep coming up to maintain altitude. Plane starts dropping and the instinct is to pull up, worsening the situation.
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Forgot to put the flaps in. Stall speed goes up. Less room for error.
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Severe wind shear. Headwind to a tailwind so quickly you don't have time to react and your speed drops dramatically. Often times the plane isn't capable of powering out of this situation.
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This isn't to say that there aren't tons of cost cutting measures going on that cause issue, but the cost cutting is put into the cabin, not the actual plane.
I worked at a small regional airport and the small/mid sized jetliners that flew in had issues all the time, but the worst case scenario was electrical fire in the cabin because of a poorly maintained passenger area. The hub and spoke model helps a lot too. The smaller planes only spend half their time at airports unequipped to repair them, and the large planes are never at an airport unequipped to repair them.
As for profits, one of the big reasons that the profit motive doesn't drive airlines to run their planes into the ground is that a broken plane makes no money, and can't be resold (on top of the reputation thing, people seeing your company logo looming over 300+ corpses on the news for weeks can really fuck up the bottom line).
They've basically determined that you can make people insanely uncomfortable and still get their money. You can fuck them over with fees and fines and non-refundable tickets, you can accidentally mess up the cabin conditions and cause small electrical fires and people will still come fly with you. The only thing that makes them stop is if they think your plane is dangerous.
