One can only imagine the horrors lurking in industries lucky enough not to have had any famous failures recently.
If you mean the US big airliner industry, then Boeing is essentially it, so yes, And I presume it comes directly from the FAA delegating so much of their job to Boeing meaning Boeing had to inspect itself.
The you had the bad deal grand fathered between USA and EU : FAA inspect Boeing planes, EASA has to accept that certification without checking by themselves.
Airbus need to be certified by the EASA, they have much less if any delegated authority for that (though they do pay a lot into that, there is a difference between you need to pay into your regulator and you are your own regulator through your own employees). And then they need to separately be certified by Boeing.
This means the surface area for Boeing screwing around is much, much larger.
I don't doubt there are flaws if we looked into airbus assembly, but I highly doubt they would be systemic and part of a larger screwed process like what is being found at Boeing.
There wasn't a "bad deal grandfathered" - there was a general acceptance of FAA flight certificates in many regulatory areas due to previous good performance of those, which was wrecked by 737 MAX crashes. Even then it wasn't automatic pass, it was more that local certification authorities would let you submit it in lieu of some checks but could require more.
Also, apparently Airbus has wildly different policies for dealing with suppliers, which are seen as both bad (they aren't easy to work with and most importantly they mean more risk to supplier) but also good (better oversight, integration, and Airbus will actually help you deal with your suppliers, and the risk is shared)
It's a grandfathered deal from the formation of the EASA. Before that, most national aviation authority in europe didn't have the ability to check all planes, so they accepted others'; while the FAA checked the planes of everyone. When the EASA was formed, we kept that part.
You're definitely right that we're all paying extra attention to Boeing at the moment, but if you look around I think you'll find that there actually have been pretty recent famous failures in quite a few industries.
Or are these used metaphorically, like virtual computer stuff versus physical office stuff (desktop, folder, etc.) where there's enough similarity to avoid making new words but they're operated quite differently?
In addition protectionism has meant that you generally have to land or take off at an airport run by the flag you carry.
So unlike shipping, a Malaysian airline can't fly from the US to UK.
This means that airlines need to be based at their 'real' base of operations, they can't just register in a tax-shelter.
Their flag?
Their company's residency?
Their production location?
Guess what, all are bought and sold off for cheap on the market.
Oh and they pay less than 1.5% taxes, usually, if they even pay taxes.
If this causes conflicts that make certain flags legally incompatible with certain combinations of sources and destinations - good. Those flags-of-convenience can harmonize their rules to the rest of the world. The environment and human rights will benefit.
I have nothing good to say for oil spills though. I was interning st Exxon's upstream research department when the BP oil spill happened in the gulf. What I heard from many people that had been there for a a long time amounted to no one being too surprised given how the industry works and how much is outsourced. They also (rightfully) expected the main concern to be PR. Exxon researchers were the ones to give BP the chemicals to coagulate the oil into globs and sink it just below the surface. They were really proud of it at the time, though having family on the Gulf Coast I was less impressed with the solution or the tar balls that washed up on the beach for years.
well Baltimore thinks otherwise
Baltimore was a terrible scenario with power failure at just the wrong time, but ships do regularly lose power or have mechanical issues and very rarely cause Amy damage. If a plane loses power it falls and hits whatever is below.
And that 15 to 20 glide ratio is for best possible condition.
If no massive technological breakthrough happens at some point the operation is as efficient as it can be while producing safe products but still you have to become more efficient for next quarterly/yearly results to keep the shareholders happy (if you can't find new clients to expand to). It is at that point that you start cutting corners and end up in situations like this.
This happens in every field but obviously in most fields the cost of these failures is not big enough to really matter but when you apply it to aviation you get planes with hundreds of people crashing into the ocean.
Is that so bad? According to the IIHS there were 43k automotive deaths in the US in 2021. Meanwhile the last passenger death in a scheduled commercial flight[1] in the US was 4 years ago. In the past decade there has only been 2 deaths.
[1] this excludes flights like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Mutiny_Bay_DHC-3_Otter_cr..., because they're essentially flying general aviation planes which are far less reliable than airliners that people typically associate with air travel. If you include them the number goes up to 27.
------------
Total number of global flights per year: ~38.9 Million
Total deaths over the last decade (3,562)
-> 21.2 deaths per million trips
Cars
------------
Total number of driving trips per year US: 227 Billion
(using your number of 43K deaths per year)
-> 1.9 deaths / million trips
Wow, I'm surprised but actually airline travel is less safe then driving.
Links:
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-....
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/263443/worldwide-air-tra...
Said another way, compare "trips by plane" against "a set of car trips whose average duration matches that of trips by plane."
No they're not. If you're in San Fransisco for instance, a 12 hour drive maybe gets you to LA, Vegas, and maybe salt lake city. It can't even get you to Seattle or Phoenix. Meanwhile even if you factor in getting to the airport 3 hours before departure, 1 hour to get to the airport, and 1 hour to get to your final destination, that leaves you with 7 hours of flight time. That's enough for a direct flight anywhere in the lower 48 states, and as well as many cities in Canada and Mexico.
I would say the most sensible is "per passenger hour", followed by "per passenger mile", since in some cases one might be choosing between driving somewhere and flying there.
By both of these metrics, airplanes are much safer than cars.
Not trying to be contrarian or anything but I'm curious why. Another comment mentioned the material difference in available options between comparing an 8 hour flight to an 8 hour drive. In my mind, the only meaningful metric then would be the "per passenger mile". This should be emphasized by the fact that there are destinations that literally no amount of driven miles will get you to. The utility provided from 8 hours of flight versus 8 hours of driving are so drastically different I can't imagine how you'd compare them. 8 hours of flight will let you visit roughly a quarter of the world. 8 hours of driving won't even get you a quarter of the way across the US.
You want per person per trip to actually calculate an individual's risk on a single trip.
Then you need to account for distance or time. If I had to guess, that's three to four orders of magnitude more time or distance per trip.
- The decision of "is it safe to take this trip or not" is tied to the trip. Once you get in a plane or get in a car, you've made the safety decision. It's not really reversable for flight, and it's only partially reversable if you're driving a car.
- The risk in air travel is largely dominated by the takeoff, landing and quality of plane production and maintenance. It's not strongly tied to distance or flight time. Once you're in the air, I speculate that there are fewer opportunities for adverse events then a car. To put it another way, flying from SF to San Diego is not 2x risker then flying from SF to LA despite it being more than 2x the distance and flight time. Compare this to a car, where you encounter many more cars in close proximity, many more obstacles (stop lights, pedestrians, turns). A 15 minute ride to get groceries likely has 10x the number of opportunities for adverse events as compared to an airplane. Car risk is denser and linear, where as flight risk seems more constant.
- Number of people on a plane doesn't really affect the safety of a trip. (saw this in some other comments)
However, I do recognize that commercial airline deaths are a better metric for general travel comparison. Though I would use the global data. We do know of two fatal crashes of the Boeing planes in the last decade so if you're cherry picking the US data then you are also introducing bias. This is especially true given my earlier point about risks associated with plane quality.
After listening to a few too many aviation accident breakdowns and the reasons behind them, I'm honestly surprised the general population doesn't hear more about these shenanigans and the dangers surrounding the hobby. It's way too easy to mix the commercial airline safety records with general aviation and have a false sense of security around those types of flights. It's one thing when an inexperienced pilot kills themselves through neglect and incompetence, but a very different sort of impact when looking at these reckless pilots who get others killed. Think of any celebrity who has died in an aviation incident from Denver to Kobe and they are all general aviation accidents. Small planes with less experienced or complacent pilots.
I also don't think you understand the current airline industry. Both Boeing and Airbus desperately want to grow, they have orders lined up for decades and just need factories and people. The issue is not a stagnant industry looking for cost-cutting it is a very in demand industry desperate to fill orders.
Ultimately, for a lot of publicly held companies, quite often the "boss making the decision" is an excel sheet on some analysts desk that will result in a specific pressure being applied on company.
The entire airline industry knows that if you are lax on safety critical issues, there will be consequences. The consequences over the last few years have focused on Boeing, because it actually is a Boeing problem.
Yes.
> To put it another way, is this the kind of problem that is endemic across industry and we’re only finding out now because we are taking the time to look?
That is a completely different matter. The increased scrutiny on Boeing can simply be uncovering that the wheels have been coming off for a while as result of the stock-chasing policy they’ve been following for 25 years.
Previously it could be covered up because their primary regulator was too hands off but recent events have led to the FAA dedicating more resources to Boeing, and thus having a lot more opportunities to trip over malfeasance.
This was the stuff that former quality engineer and whistleblower was in the middle of a five day deposition when he died to a gunshot wound. Allegedly “self-inflicted”.
This stuff isn’t being uncovered so much that there had been people loudly trying to tell this to the world for years now. What’s changed is that with the series of very public failures and flight safety, it’s become difficult to spin this away. In addition, the executives may be facing felonies — not for harassing whistleblowers, but in regards to flight safety.
It’s galling to hear them “celebrate” the whistleblower for the issues reported in this article. Boeing used to have a culture where quality was the top concern, ahead of profits. With three whistleblowers dead in the past several months, the optics is not looking good for Boeing. Maybe this is more spin.
I thought it is 2…?
When MCAS drove 2 planes into the ground, they were able to proclaim "It wasn't us, it was our software vendor!." All the airframe problems? Well, that's Spirit Aerosystems!
There should be a lot of Boeing execs in prison for manslaughter.
They did not say that.
It is kinda funny - Boeing bought the company but it was McDonnell Douglas executives who held the rulership of the merged company
Boeing's Downfall: A Tale of Corporate Culture, Greed, and Safety Compromises https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/boeings-downfall-tale-corpora....
The book Flying Blind is a thorough account of how Boeing transformed from a respectable engineering shop to a business-school-jock-run FAA revolving door. Unabated capitalism sort of doesn't work when your planes are losing pieces mid-air and Airbus is eating your dinner.
Not surprisingly, there are solid arrows leading to GE and Jack Welch.
The fundamental error of bureaucracy is to conflate paperwork with reality.
The shocking thing is that as cynical as that may sound, things do in fact generally work. This suggests that the problem is less on the side of reality and more on the side of the paperwork and the bureaucracy. You see this one instance where the mismatch is problematic, but honestly there's immense mismatch everywhere, and generally, things work, because while in bureaucratic theory a mismatch between paperwork and reality is itself intrinsically a problem, in reality, it's only a problem if something goes wrong, and usually it doesn't.
If that doesn't make sense to you, consider that there is an evolutionary process in play. The particular ways in which mismatches cause real problems tend to get squeezed out of the system by the very failures they create, whereas all the harmless mismatches can persist. And yeah, eventually some of those "harmless" mismatches will get upgraded to "whoops less harmless than we thought", but they will be the exceptions, not the rule, and calling in advance which they will be is a lot harder than meets the eye.
There's kind of a variant of Gell-Mann Amnesia at work here; $YOU know that in the specific place you work, paperwork is a faint echo of reality, documentation is perpetually underinvested in, processes are constantly diverging from the paper processes, the field workers in charge of managing paperwork generally coevolve a particular "flavor" of compliance that passes initial checks but may have shall we say "complicated" relationships with reality... but $YOU think that all the other paperwork in the world is being done studiously by superhumans with unflagging concentration, impeccable ethics, and presumably, about 96 hours in their day. It seems to be built into the human condition somehow. Somehow, we are all bureaucrats at heart.
If you go looking you will find. And it's almost never pretty stuff. There is however a lot of paperwork filled in that says everything is fine.
McDonnell-Douglas have no involvement with Airbus and Airbus still maintains an immaculate safety record the past few years relative to Boeing. Boeing alone was never the issue -- their partnership with McDD however has caused these issue perhaps the US gov should buy out their stake with a compulsory purchase order for the sake of national security.
Boeing is only a few disasters away from a complete loss in confidence in the company at this point.