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?
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.