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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> Coming from startup land, it’s so clear the lack of available and qualified controllers is directly down line of this thorny problem.

Am I wrong to feel personally that lowering the hiring standards for ATC controllers is a step in the wrong direction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjoDn8zQgb8

One of the top comments:

> The controllers I know are PISSED about this because this was grossly ATC’s fault.

I'm personally terrified every-time I get on a plane. If you go to a restauraunt, your order coming out right and not making you sick depends on like, 3-4 systems/employees/supply chains/whatever. I'd say it's like 80% fine most of the time.

How many supply chains does a plane go through? 80% fine most cuts it for like... mild tech production incidents, screwed up food orders

How does it work out for airplanes/ATC?

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Commercial air travel is the safest form of transportation in the history of the planet. If you’re terrified every time you get on a plane, you shouldn’t be using that intuition as a guide to policy.

> Commercial air travel is the safest form of transportation in the history of the planet.

Until it's not, right?

Historically, it has been.

If there was a 1/1,000,000,000 chance you were going to die on a plane ride, would you voluntarily choose to take it? Ok, what about 1/1,000,000?

Arnold Barnett, a statistician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied airline safety, tells NPR that from 2018 to 2022, the chances of a passenger being killed on a flight anywhere in the world was 1 in 13.4 million. Between 1968 to 1977, the chance was 1 in 350,000.

"Worldwide flying is extremely safe, but in the United States, it's extraordinarily so," Barnett said.

In the U.S., there has not been a fatal plane crash involving a major American airline since February 2009, though there have been a handful of fatalities since then.

Brickhouse, who has studied aviation safety for over 25 years, often tells people that the biggest risk of any air journey tends to be driving to the airport.

More than 40,000 people are killed on U.S. roads each year.

"Aviation remains the safest mode of transportation," he says.

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/12/1237262132/why-flying-safe-un....

Forget how many people are killed, because when you get to that point, then things have already gotten really bad. Look at the leading indicators first: how many near-misses and other incidents (like mechanical failures) have happened in the US over the last 25 years, and is the trend up or down?

The incident with the 737 door falling off is a good example here: this would have been a fatal incident if this had been a full flight. Thankfully, the seat next to the door was empty that day, so no one got seriously hurt, but it could have been much worse.

It's hard to tell for sure without a reliable source of unbiased data rather than various news stories, but it sure seems that the frequency of incidents (in the US) is rising lately, not falling, and that's not good, it's like the canary in the coal mine. Things need to be fixed before planes start falling out of the sky with spectacularly fatal results because too many deep systemic problems have come together to destroy the safety record that existed before. Instead, too many people want to rest on past successes, saying "look! It's so safe compared to driving!" and do nothing.

Crackheads jumping in front of buses has nothing to do with whether motor vehicle travel is safe. An intellectually honest comparison would be to compare the incidence of fatalities while being driven around in a recent model sedan by a professional driver

Safety ratings for travel are based on passenger miles, so your example is moot.

So... drunk 15 year olds on motorcycles doing drive-bys. Got it.

This isn’t the conundrum you think it is. My estimated statistical value of life (revealed preference) is ~$30M, so I would get on a flight with a 10^-9 risk without thinking twice, but would value the 10^-6 risk at about $30. That is, I would choose to fly in a plane that had an additional 10^-6 risk of death if it was $50 cheaper, but not if it was only $5 cheaper.

The odds to die in a car ride are about 4000 higher than in an airplane flight [1]. Knowing that, would you willingly ride a car?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/15thhsh/...

You have about a 1 in 1 billion chance of dying for every 750 feet or so that you drive.

I take risks far in excess of 1 in a billion every day.

The industry is currently very safe, so lowering hiring standards will not affect overall safety rates (much)? Is that the argument?

I mean exactly what I said: anyone who has this fear, which is untethered from reality, should not trust their intuition about what mechanisms are important for safety.

Your statistics are a tough pitch when we're hearing about chronic deficiencies like bolts missing from doors and whatnot. I don't have a fear of flying, but my intuition tells me the effects of Boeing mismanagement will take years to peter out and I don't think it's unreasonable I'm avoiding their newer planes even if it causes me some inconvenience.

You know about the missing bolts and whatnot because there is a process for uncovering them. Do you want to guess how many missing bolts auto mechanics leave out when they do car repairs? Nobody knows because nobody is keeping track.

It shouldn't take an incident like a panel detaching mid-flight to discover the missing bolts. The processes clearly aren't working very well at Boeing.

You accused OP of letting his opinions be molded by “feels”/fears but you’re doing the same thing just in the opposite direction.

We know about the bolts because a door blew off a plane mid-flight, do I need to tell you how we know about MCAS?

Air travel is the safest but thanks to the exact opposite mentality you are presenting.

Science&technology is not a God and engineers are not the patron saints.

> We know about the bolts because a door blew off a plane mid-flight

We know about the bolts because a door blew off a plane mid-flight and there are reporting requirements when that happens. Then there is an investigation.

When a door falls off a car driving down the road, the driver picks it up and puts it in the trunk and has it reattached or replaced. Whether they even file an insurance claim depends on their deductible and either way nobody is doing a root cause analysis to prevent it from happening again.

I can’t tell if you’re arguing (a) that the old statistics aren’t a reliable guide to the future because of recent events or (b) you can’t/won’t listen to the data because of strong emotions induced by the Boeing stories.

If (a), then you’re wrong. It’s exactly because this has been going on at Boeing for years (and because planes are so outrageously same that they can get 10x more dangerous without it much affecting the assessment) that we can upper bound how much new risk there is at a quite small level.

If (b), at least you’re being honest.

I see and hear about the mistakes that my coworkers make that don't make the news, and I still have no problem flying. There are many layers of safety including the systems and pilots onboard the planes, and statistics still show it is still safer than driving.

Lowering standards is definitely the wrong way to go. Increasing pay to attract and keep good controllers is the better route.

You are going to the wrong places to eat if your food isn't even "fine" 20% of the time.

How many supply chains does your gallon of milk go through? Are 20% of gallons of milk spoiled, rotten, undrinkable, causing illness?

Nope.

Your entire arguments flies in the face of a mountain of empirical evidence of the safety of modern scale systems.

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