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I've often heard it said that FAA regulations are written in blood. Meaning, if a rule exists, it exists for a damn good reason.

For anyone interested, NASA's ASRS [1] (Aviation Safety Reporting System) is what the parent commenter is referring to regarding reporting near misses. The idea is, anyone can submit an incident report with NASA, a neutral separate party from the FAA, which is placed in an anonymized public database and cannot be used to justify punishment against anyone involved in the incident. This promotes transparency and learning from the mistakes of yourself and others, instead of covering them up. Frequently, the person who caused an incident in the first place will promptly report it to ASRS, as the FAA looks favorably upon those who come forward to ASRS on their own and dimly upon those who do not.

I think more industries could use this kind of transparency in reporting sketchy situations.

[1]: https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/overview/confidentiality.html

This is some piece of reading about the odd history of government and aviation... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Mail_scandal

I often remarked in the same vein to my daughters as they were growing up and learning to drive. Everywhere you encounter a stop sign, a light, etc., is a place where people were badly injured or killed on multiple occasions. That stuff is there for a reason.

New road construction starts with stop signs and traffic lights. They don't just leave it a free-for-all and add them later on.

Now, when you see quadruple stop signs (i.e. 16 total) and a jury-rigged flashing red light attached to them, as there was in my home town, chances are that one came about after some accidents.

There's this place in Atlanta where one makes a 180 turn from one interstate to another. They added flashing lights, paint all over the place, signs. Still, there are so many vehicles going off the road that no grass ever grows there. Here's the Google Street view of the dirt patch, complete with vehicle debris which accumulates almost every day.

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7939354,-84.3917037,3a,75y,1...

From street view that doesn't seem that difficult to negotiate - is it just distracted/low skill drivers? Speeds too high?

On a side note - zooming out from that, the sprawl of Atlanta looks unlivable. On several nearby highways I counted 18+ lanes!

Having negotiated this particular turn many times, I'd guess it's a combination of factors. Atlanta is spread out so the highways are typically long and straight, so apart from rush hour the fast lane typically goes 70-80 mph comfortably. Even on highways, you're usually ok to reduce speed to 60 mph to make interstate turns, e.g. spaghetti junction (85/285). Interstate turns this sharp are very rare so even natives need to be alert. I-75 is a long multi-state road so many out-of-towners may not be expecting the sharpness of this turn. Not sure if this plays into it, but it does also exit from the fast lane.

There's a "Right Lane Ends" sign right there, and I'd imagine people unfamiliar with the turn see that sign and their brain just can't catch up with trying to process both slowing down for the 25mph turn and a left merge.

Might be better to have the left merge occur before the turn, then do the turn. Otherwise you're doing several things at once: Merging, slowing down, and maintaining direction around a turn with a changing radius. Two of those would probably be challenging at once.

Ha, I grew up in Atlanta but left 12 years ago and haven't been back. I immediately knew exactly the spot you were talking about.

At what point do you change the turn? Signs and paint is great, but maybe the fundamentals are just bad.

That road is knackered too - is that a commmon state for roads around there?

The roads in the US are in general horribly maintained. I've driven across it north/south 8-10 times and east/west 4 times along different routes/not just freeways and it's rare to find great roads. Michigan was the worst but luckily starting/ending in Ontario we weren't often on their roads for long.

Sorta depends where you're at. In cities that have hot summers and cold winters (Spokane, etc.) you get terrible roads. Poorer parts of cities have worse roads than richer parts (compare north Tacoma to basically the rest of Tacoma).

In suburban, high-traffic†, low-traffic†, or moderate climate areas the roads are fine. In fact some of the freeways around where I live have been putting in the "quiet asphalt" stuff— driving is quiet, even in my 2000 Corolla!

† High traffic areas get attention because they get beat up easily. Low traffic highways do not get as beat up. This still kinda depends on who maintains the road, how rich the surrounding area is, climate, etc.

Weather is really important. For all the traffic it has, the freeways in LA are generally not that bad. 300 days of sunshine and no freezing temps helps a lot.

That's why I specified how widely travelled I was. I definitely understand weather related issues having grown up in Ontario with a 50-60c swing in temps over the course of a year + salt. But I saw lots of awful roads in the north east, the south, midwest, south west, west, and north west.

It's pretty safe to say that in general US roads are poorly maintained. Like saying in general UK rail is poorly maintained.

Sometimes it's quite explicit: in Korea there are signs saying 사망사고 발생지점, literally, "Place of a fatal accident".

The problem is that sometimes that part of the road isn't even particularly dangerous, so I wonder what was the rationale for forever reminding people that somebody died there...

I remember little white crosses on the side of the road in Montana. If a turn had a number of crosses that was a pretty good indication that you really need to be careful.

In Costa Rica, for a number of years a few years ago, they would paint a hollow yellow heart, with a halo, inside a box, on top of the part of a street or road where a fatal accident occurred. However, after some time, they stopped repainting them after each time the road was resurfaced.

Obviously that's not even remotely true, so why are you telling your daughters that?

Don't lie to your kids. They're smarter than you think.

Napkin math suggests you are wrong, the grand parent is right.

I can't find the exact stats but in the US there are 2+ million injuries per year caused by road traffic crashes. We know there are around 300k signalized intersections [1]. If we estimate non-signalized intersections (ie. those with STOP signs) to 20x that number, that's 6 million non-signalized intersections. If 20% of injuries happen at intersections and are randomly distributed across intersections, then on average there will be 1 injury at a given intersection every 15 years.

So yeah it is likely that "multiple injuries" have occured at mosts intersections in the country.

[1] http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/knowledge/faqs/faq_part4.htm#tcsgq...

Where I live, there are at least a couple hundred stop signs and two (2) traffic signals. That's probably closer to a typical ratio for suburbs and smaller towns. I doubt there's ever been a serious accident at most of those intersections, and certainly not as the catalyst for putting up all the signs. The major accidents happen on the highways outside of town, during blizzards.

Perhaps you should ask your local roads department how they decide where to put traffic control structures before talking about lying :).

If you think the answer to that question is going to be, "Whenever somebody gets hurt," then I'd say you're the one who needs to place that particular call.

We know that highway speed limits aren't generally optimized for safety, for instance: https://www.motorists.org/issues/speed-limits/faq/

So in your mind how come brand new roads have road signs and lights? Nobody has been killed or injured on a road that hasn't existed before.

And don't you think they could apply some historical knowledge that a new road similar to an old one could use similar signs? Do you think the actively wait until someone gets killed before they add any signs to obviously dangerous new intersections?

That's certainly true for new construction, so I should probably qualify that I live in the northeast, where totally new roads are very rare, and almost all of our roads evolved from much earlier thoroughfares. The reality in other parts of the country is probably much different (and informed by our experience here, where the first roads in the U.S. were constructed). In this part of the country it is indeed true to say that almost all traffic control structures were placed because a particular spot caused accidents.

There is also a fair bit of "systems thinking" in aviation, which focuses not on who to blame when things go wrong, but how were systems set up to permit failure. Barring gross negligence or malice, most things go wrong for reasons other than the immediately involved actors.

> Barring gross negligence or malice, most things go wrong for reasons other than the immediately involved actors.

Anytime I hear of systems failing, I can't help but think about Dr. Cook's paper on How Complex Systems Fail - http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...

> I'm libertarian and a pilot - and I like the FAA

Me too. For every frustration about what they've done to the costs of things in GA, and those are valid, their accomplishments in general are incredible.

> I generally take a dim view of regulators, who generally seem to have less expertise than the people they're regulating.

The thing that always worries me is — if we try to prevent the "revolving door" whereby regulators hire from the industry they're regulating, then how will we ever have regulators who know what they're doing?

Most of the problem isn't people retiring to a government job, it's people leaving the government to a private sector job.

Exactly. The promise of a well paid private sector sinecure after your time in public office is what creates the perverse incentive for regulators.

Culture yes, but also consequences.

The consequences for a failure in aviation, is often death, and this is probably why everyone is on their best behavior. Consequences for a failure in banking policy are less obvious.

I get the feeling that people don't regard wiping out someone's savings and destroying their retirement, as grave as death, and so profiteers will either consciously or subconsciously, use that as justification for their actions.

The consequence of death does absolutely not discourage people. Several people die everyday in the US because they were texting while driving. The problem with the consequence of death is that no one believes it will happen to them.

Or rather, we have a terrible intuition about relative probabilities. Explains not wearing seatbelts, playing the lottery, and lots more.

I think fear of death is a universally strong motivator. The problem with drivers is that they're allowed to drive with a pittance of training, and not fully educated about the various ways they can put themselves at risk.

Also there's a rationalization that occurs even in drivers who should know better: even if you put yourself at risk and get into an accident, many types of auto accidents, even catastrophic ones, are survivable. A pilot would never make such a rationalization because aviation accidents have much worse survivability rates.

> The consequences for a failure in aviation, is often death, and this is probably why everyone is on their best behavior.

Well, except for the pilot who took off with inadequate fuel and killed a football team.

> In a sad coincidence, that this article was posted on the same day that a plane crash in Colombia killed 71 people. Not every region of the world has been as fortunate as ours, and we are wise not to gloat.

As a former Boeing engineer designing flight critical systems for the 757, the safety of airliners is deeply embedded in the culture at Boeing. Nobody wants to be responsible for a fault that results in a crash. Furthermore, Boeing is acutely aware that if an airliner design acquires a reputation for shoddiness, unsafety, etc., it can very easily put them out of that business (that has happened to other airframe companies, look what happened to Lockheed with the Elektra).

They got the largest military aircraft contract ever?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

In all seriousness, I've done a floor tour of the boeing factory, its really an incredible place. The work you and all the engineers do there is amazing. Thank you.

The Elektra's reputation caused Lockheed's exit from the airliner business.

(Getting a tour of the Boeing factory floor is really quite an experience!)

Fair point.

The tour was amazing. AOPA set it up as part of the Bremmerton (sp?) fly in. Coming from the software world, seeing the efficiency and precision of the floor was unreal.

It helps that everybody's economical interests are aligned into a hight safety level.

This environment would never exist in an area where companies could be created overnight, sell something for a while, and safely fail before their social (PR) costs become obvious.

If bank executives had a device implanted in their chest that would explode if their bank ended up insolvent they'd probably run things very, very differently.

> a problem elsewhere in society - investment banking in the 2000s for example - people propose heavy regulatory solutions

Air flight is not "adversarial", has the ability to directly and spectacularly kill people, and doesn't have the same upside potential for making extraordinary amounts of money. You can cut costs, but only asymptotically towards 100%.

Whereas in finance, the potential upside to misbehavior is unlimited, the negative side effects are indirect, and there is already an adversarial culture of "beating" other people in your deals. So the regulatory culture ends up having to be adversarial as well, because you can't get people to give up multi-millions for the sake of playing nice.

> When I see a problem elsewhere in society - investment banking in the 2000s for example - people propose heavy regulatory solutions. That may work, but wouldn't be so much of a battle if the culture were better.

The toxic culture of investment banking is a feature, not a bug. If you cleaned it up, it wouldn't be high finance anymore.

No, for a long time starting with the new deal, we had high finance with a much less toxic culture. The change happened because a bunch of conservative politicians persuaded the government that high finance is natural self-regulating and so it would be just fine to gut many of the key regulations. The crash of 2008 was one consequence. And Trump is very much on the financial deregulation side.

" That may work, but wouldn't be so much of a battle if the culture were better."

The culture of guys moving people around in the air or the culture of guys making bets

"elsewhere in society" also education, health care