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?
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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:
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: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.
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.
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.