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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

If a plane has a serious issue 10 000 feet off, every one in it will die. Fact of life: Humans don't fly.

Most issues have a reproducible reason, so it's likely that the same problem will happen on many many planes and kill a whole lot of people.

For the comparison, cars are risk free. What happens when your car is broken? You just can't go anywhere. It's not like people are falling off the sky in pack of a few hundreds at a time.

-- Ex aerospace engineer.

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Let's not be absurd. Brakes failure in a car isn't going to stop you starting it and getting on the freeway. Wasn't it Toyota found that to be more than an inconvenience?

As a matter of fact, yes a brake failure will stop you from going on the freeway.

You will realize the problem the first time you try to brake, likely on the first turn or the first light.

For the comparison, imagine a brake failure on a plane.

A plane can already take a mile to stop with working brakes. How many buildings and trees do you think it will take to substitute to the brakes?

I'm not sure if you're being serious, but brakes can fail while driving, and have definitely failed on people who are driving on a freeway when they go.

Planes have multiple systems available (within the plane and without) that can stop the plane (relatively) safely even in the event of a brake failure.

Reverse thrust on your engines is one of them, spoilers are another (not only do they increase the effectiveness of the brakes by putting more of the aircraft weight on them, but they also increase drag), and even if the aircraft gets to the end of the runway, at most international airports they have an overrun area called a runway safety area which is essentially like driving your car into a sand bank.

EDIT: Picture: http://theinfrastructureshow.com/images/70.jpg

For someone who claims to be an aerospace engineer, you have a shocking lack of understanding of redundant systems.

>If a plane has a serious issue 10 000 feet off, every one in it will die

Complete nonsense, unless you tautologically define "serious" to mean "fatal".

I can only assume you are trolling given the factual inaccuracy of your first sentence (which you presumably know if your ex-job title is true) and the patent ridiculousness of saying "cars are risk free".

That assumes that cars break while not in use. Tires can pop while being driven, for example. There are plenty of devastating and life-taking accidents that come from car failures.

And plenty of in-use car failures do not take lives. Tires popping during a drive don't often result in death of the occupants of the troubled car nor those around it. If your car engine stops running, you're not going to fall to your death for lack of speed. If your jet engines all stop, the chance that death will result is quite a bit higher.

"If your car engine stops running, you're not going to fall to your death for lack of speed."

You know, to even get your private pilot's license, you have to pass a simulated engine-out. Fixed-wing craft are perfectly capable of gliding without power.

Indeed. They're not required to crash with engines out. But on a passenger jet, the odds of crashing and causing deaths from several miles up when the engines fail is tremendously higher than death being caused by an engine failure at speed on the highway.

Actually, if engines fail at altitude there's much lower risk than you'd think. Even in the case where the damn engines fall off the plane (yes, this really did happen), there's surprisingly few if any fatalities.

Complete engine failure is mostly risky in two situations, over water and low altitude. Ask Sully about having both happen at once and still no deaths!

(Edit to add sources)

Commercial flights with engine failures in the past 30 years w/o fatalities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_855 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapag-Lloyd_Flight_3378 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines_Flight... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549

Commercial flights with engine failures and fatalities (one fatality, a flight attendant): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garuda_Indonesia_Flight_421

> If your car engine stops running, you're not going to fall to your death for lack of speed

If your airplane engine stops working you're not going to be able to get off the ground in the first place.

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