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Comment by KGIII | Hacker News Reader

I am not an expert but I know many pilots, watch only documentaries, read research papers almost exclusively, and have stayed in a Best Western.

NTSB is, as far as I understand, actually very careful about not blaming anyone. They look for causes and solutions, not blame. They, as far as I know, pride themselves on this.

They try, again inasmuch as I know, to not blame a person - but to blame a process. This is not a distinction without difference. It fosters an attitude of cooperation and openness.

Again, I'm not an expert but I know a bunch of pilots and listen when they speak. If the NTSB blamed people, I suspect they'd have a lesser willingness to speak positively about NTSB.

Edit: Someone beat me to it. I will leave this as I think it offers a bit more of a comprehensive view.

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> They try, again inasmuch as I know, to not blame a person - but to blame a process. This is not a distinction without difference. It fosters an attitude of cooperation and openness.

Because even when the cause was blatant human error, it can still be a process problem -- how did this type of human error slice through all the protections against it? What process can be put into place to prevent disaster even when some bonehead does that same thing again?

But air travel safety is atypical.

If the crash rate for planes was the same as it is for cars then air travel would have to be prohibited as a necessary measure to prevent the extinction of the human race.

Most endeavors are not of that sort.

And so in most other contexts we could use their methods to produce a process that will prevent a particular category of trouble, but suffering the trouble costs $2M (instead of $2B) and implementing the process costs $20M.

And then people will want to implement it anyway, even though they shouldn't, because "it solves the problem".

Or, seeing the obvious fallacy in spending $20M to prevent $2M in harm, a "compromise" is proposed to spend $1M to prevent 5% of the $2M harm, still with no one doing the math. And then, problem still 95% unsolved, more half measures are kludged on over time until the surrounding bureaucracy becomes politically powerful enough to be self-sustaining.

Because people don't want to admit that some diseases aren't worse than their cures.

> If the crash rate for planes was the same as it is for cars then air travel would have to be prohibited as a necessary measure to prevent the extinction of the human race.

Well, no, this is obviously false. Much more car travel is done than air travel; bringing air fatalities up to the level of car fatalities would have a negligible effect on the human population.

Bringing crashes per vehicle mile up to the level of highway crashes per vehicle mile according to https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu..., assuming that an average airplane carries 140 people, and assuming (very wrongly) that crashing it kills all 140, you could get deaths to airplane crashes up to 843,000 per year for the US. This would be significant -- it would be an increase of over 30% in the annual death rate -- but it is less than the existing surplus of annual births over annual deaths. A modest reduction in population growth just isn't going to drive the human race extinct.

You're assuming the existing expense of making air travel safe is not reducing the quantity of air travel done.

Imagine it was as easy to become a pilot as to get a driver's license, there were no flight plans or restrictions on where people could take off or land and a 500MPH jet could be purchased for $150,000 because there would be less regulatory overhead and more competition in aircraft production.

Affluent people would be commuting by jet. There could easily be ten times as many air miles traveled or more.

If you want to "reason" that way, take into account that (1) if people started dying from air travel at high rates, they'd do less of it; and (2) societies with much higher death rates have no problem growing anyway, as they compensate with higher birth rates.

> if people started dying from air travel at high rates, they'd do less of it

That doesn't seem to stop people from driving cars.

> societies with much higher death rates have no problem growing anyway, as they compensate with higher birth rates.

That's just survivorship bias. Why would one cause the other? There were also societies with high death rates and low birth rates which for the obvious reason no longer exist.

> There were also societies with high death rates and low birth rates which for the obvious reason no longer exist.

If you claim to be worried about extinction of the human race, you'll have to consider all societies, not just the ones with pathologically low birth rates. A tiny group of people committing suicide has zero effect on the overall human population.

>They look for causes and solutions, not blame. They, as far as I know, pride themselves on this.

If the cause is a person's behavior, that is the same thing as blame. Look at the report of the Pinnacle 3701. Probable causes from [1]:

1. the pilots' unprofessional behavior, deviation from standard operating procedures, and poor airmanship;

2. the pilots' failure to prepare for an emergency landing in a timely manner, including communicating with air traffic controllers immediately after the emergency about the loss of both engines and the availability of landing sites;

3. the pilots' improper management of the double engine failure checklist

It's hard to look at that and say that the pilots weren't being blamed.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinnacle_Airlines_Flight_3701

It does happen, but is the exception. Look at the aftermath section. You can also look at the aftermath sections of other flights.

Sometimes, a human is to blame and there's no getting around that. This doesn't change their goal.

The difference is the approach — they look for the cause and sometimes the cause is the blame.

When you only look for the blame, you tend to be satisfied once you reach that goal and might ignore the cause.

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