There might be another loose bolt issue, this time in the rudder control system: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/faa-closely-monitoring-inspecti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_rudder_issues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_585
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAir_Flight_427I've heard of a few cases where applying more/less power on the right/left engines can sort of crudely achieve the same thing, and you might get lucky and get on the groud without crashing, but loss of the rudder would be a serious emergency indeed.
Only if you add a secondary constraint of coordinated turns, which are important for passenger comfort and efficiency, but not directly a safety concern. (You still need directional stability, but that's provided by the fixed portion of the vertical tail, not the rudder.)
> and for flying straight in a crosswind.
Only if you add a secondary constraint of alignment between body angle and flight path. This constraint is totally absent in normal flight -- it only comes up during takeoff and landing, where it's useful to have the plane lined up with the runway to avoid side-loading the landing gear. In the case of a known rudder failure, you'd head to an alternate where there's not much crosswind, to avoid this issue; but you wouldn't expect many issues getting there.
The third case where the rudder is actually critical is when combined with other failures, especially asymmetric engine failures. There are parts of the flight envelope where a single engine failure combined with a rudder failure would not be expected to be survivable.
However, that doesn't mean that planes can fly with the rudder /loose/. A significant risk in higher-speed airplane designs is that of aerodynamic flutter, where aerodynamic forces excite a vibration mode in the airframe, or a subset of it. You can find some impressive video of e.g. bending modes in sailplane wings being excited, with increasing magnitude bending until the wings are destroyed (or the excitation is reduced dramatically, or shifted to a different frequency). While aeroelastic modes get a lot of attention in flutter analysis, loose control surfaces can be much, much worse, because movement of the surface within the lash provided by the loose connections is effectively undamped.
I'm so surprised people aren't more terrified to fly. So many different things can go wrong. I know what the statistics say about driving versus flying but I feel like over time with all of these Boeing issues that statistic is slightly changing for the worse?
> According to the latest estimates, there are approximately 100,000 flights per day. This number includes all types of flights, including passenger, cargo, and military aircraft. Passenger flights alone account for over 90,000 flights per day, transporting millions of passengers to destinations all around the world.
I guess 365 days a year, 100k flights a day, 1 incident is really statistically low but... it's still terrifying to put yourself in a metal tube in the sky where the risk is non-zero you die!
As to the flight terror, we're mainly scared of it for two reasons:
1. Disasters seem personally unavoidable - you can choose to drive better, etc, so any car accidents you see you can comfortably think you would have avoided. But once you're in the metal tube, you have no control over the results.
2. When it happens, it's rare and big news everywhere for weeks.
Another major issue is the awareness and helplessness. In a car accident everything happens so fast, you only have time to go 'On Sh..'. Sometimes not even that. Some people get T-Boned and die without knowing what happened.
But in case of an airliner, usually you know well ahead of time something is wrong. Engines are visibly on fire, there is fire in the cabin, it is flying side ways, it is lurching all over the place, it is spinning out of control.. etc. You have time to panic , scream, curse and cry.
Personally this is what terrifies me.
2. Traffic accidents with injuries happen daily, but very few of them are reported. That doesn't make ground transportation less risky.
Another point of good fortune was the altitude. Since the aircraft was still climbing, everyone was sitting down and wearing seatbelts.
At cruising altitude, people would have taken off the seat belts, started moving around the cabin and got sucked out due to extreme pressure differential.
All in all this was the most favourable outcome.
this fear has turned the flight industry into the safest and most responsible institution. They make mistakes, but they honestly investigate them and learn how to correct them.
It’s terrifying to put yourself in a metal box at high speed in a road where the risk is way higher than in any other mean of transport
I m interested, is there a tendency to fly passenger planes as cargo planes first over the last ten years?
Do you drive or ride in cars, busses, trains?
There are many other daily risks other than transportation.