Hacker News Reader

Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

Very scary indeed. I think for the first time in my life I will be a little on edge flying in the US. You always hear that flying is the safest mode of public transport--well, if this is the state of the ATC, we're definitely in trouble. And you know there won't be any real change until hundreds of people die needlessly...I just hope it won't be my flight.

View on HN

It's the safest per mile, but not per journey.

A nice comparison to other transport methods, including taking the bus, and the Space Shuttle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Transport_comp...

It is utterly fascinating to me that technically walking is just as safe as a car on a journey by journey basis. I definitely didn't need to know the danger per journey for flights though. I liked the lie I had before

Per that chart, flying is about 3x as deadly per journey as a car. Many people take a car to and from the airport, which means it nearly nets out already.

What do you mean, it nets out?

Shouldn't the car trips from/to the airport mean that an airplane journey is even more dangerous, as you can't really fly without those additional car trips?

Yes you can. I usually take the train to the airport.

I take a car to the train to get to the airport.

Sure, but two additional train trips also increase the total danger of the flight...

>can't really fly without those additional car trips

Hm, i almost never take a car to the airport.

It really blows my mind that the space shuttle was really so sound and safe even though I want to argue that it could have been far better. I mean this compared to SpaceX stuff blowing up a bunch before it gets the kinks worked out - I don't remember seeing or hearing about any prototype shuttles blowing up but it was before my time.

17000000 Deaths per billion flights for the space shuttle is not safe. This is more than 2,000 times more dangerous than skydiving, which is also not very safe.

It was significantly worse than that.

There were 2 failures over a total of 135 flights, with 14 fatalities. So that's about 103 fatalities per 1000 flights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

I think it's "passenger fatalities per passenger-journey". So need to multiply the number of flights by the crew on each.

Right you are, which brings us back to the ~1.7% number (actually 1.6% if you include the STS-135 mission, which Wikipedia doesn't for unknown reasons).

So a 1 in ~60 chance of dying on any given flight...have to agree that that is far from safe.

They did blow up 2 Shuttles out of 5, both crewed, so maybe they didn't get the all the kinks worked out in the first place.

Plenty of rockets did blow up on the launchpad or at various stages.

For example, the Titan I failed 17 launches, the Titan 2 failed 10 (and one exploded in the silo, while attached to a nuclear warhead), and the Atlas E/F failed 9. Even more recently, into the 90s and 00s, the Atlas I lost 3 and every Ariane variant has lost at least one.

I'm hardly a Musk fan, but although SpaceX seems particularly gung-ho about testing things they know aren't finished in order to iterate the design faster, the results after that are pretty good so far: Falcon 9 is 281 "real" flights for 2 failures, plus that one that went bang on the launchpad.

It's not 100% success rate like the Saturns, but out of 21 launches between the 1B and V, there were several near misses there. And probably quite a few A-4/V2s were harmed in the making of them and their predecessors too!

Others here have addressed the question of whether it was safe even by space flight standards, but as to whether it could have been far better, the refractory-surfaces problem alone seems to have put an upper limit on that.

These numbers are from 1990-2000. Airlines have gotten much safer since then, so I believe they would now be much safer per-journey, too. https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...

(The difference between per-mile and per-journey is still interesting!)

As well as using extremely stale sources, the Wikipedia article fails to separate airlines from other forms of civil aviation.

US airlines have a fatal crash rate very close to zero. 'General aviation', which roughly means private light aircraft, is a very different world and has roughly 1 fatal crash per 100,000 hours flown, making it less safe than driving. Chartered flights are somewhere in the middle.

There's not much sense looking at the overall figure for aviation; the different categories really are very different.

There are so many disclaimers after that table that I feel that citing it as a "nice comparison to other transport methods" is absurdly simplistic and disingenuous. Especially since a sibling comment says "It is utterly fascinating to me that technically walking is just as safe as a car on a journey by journey basis."

> I will be a little on edge flying in the US

That doesn't make sense. The article is concerning, but the USA still has a solid track-record for aviation safety, and its airlines in particular have a fatal crash rate of effectively zero. (Non-airline aviation is a different world.)

There's a slim but real chance one of us will die in a car crash. There's essentially zero chance either of us will die in an airliner crash. That would still be true even if we were both airline pilots.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com