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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I mean obviously cargo ships are not well inspected, they lose power all the time and companies just hope it doesn't happen near anything important. The oil industry is like this, you've got bottom-of-the-barrel tankers (https://www.amazon.com/Tankship-Tromedy-Impending-Disasters-...), spills continuing for decades (https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-will-pay-record-f...), leaking methane wells permanently abandoned by "bankrupt" companies, etc.

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.

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Losing power in a ship that spends almost its entire life in the open ocean is much less risky than losing power in an airplane though. Its reasonable that expectations, regulations, and maintenance schedules differ there.

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.

> is much less risky

well Baltimore thinks otherwise

My point stands in the context of the GP comment I replied to, they were pointing out how frequently container ships lose power.

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.

I agree with you, but I would like to point out that airplanes without power should glide, i.e. see gimli glider. I do wonder though if anyone has tried with recent Boeing models.

They do glide, in fact airliners have a glide ratio rivaling gliders, and substantially exceeds general aviation airplanes.

I knew most planes have quite reasonable glide distances and I knew that large commercial airliners were no exception. But from a relative standpoint (GA vs CA) this seemed suspect at first. Intuitively to me the enormous mass differences would make up for the wing surface area differences and the advantage would be to much smaller / lighter planes. On further reflection makes a lot of sense. Fuel is one of the highest costs of commercial airlines. Of course they are going to be hyper-optimizing for this where they can. A 747 being fuel efficient is far more important to bottom lines than a tiny Cessna being fuel efficient and with the relative costs of these aircraft, Boeing can invest far more in research to reduce drag and optimize lift. Aircraft glide ratios certainly seem to confirm this.

Airliner glide ratios fall between 15 and 20, which is comparable with cheapest immediately post-war training gliders for category B, aka the gliders you put a student pilot to learn how to make turns before the advent of two-seater trainer gliders.

And that 15 to 20 glide ratio is for best possible condition.

I thought ships were a little different since they can just follow the regulations of their flagged country and skirt a lot of rules.

With the amount of overlapping vocabulary, I would've thought airplanes are basically just ships in the sky. Ports, captains, boarding, etc.

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?

The need to overfly a country, vs just sail round, means that airlines need country's permission to fly into/through a country. Overflight privileges cost money.

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.

Additionally, the fact that passenger airplanes carry, well, passengers, while cargo ships don't, means that airlines are automatically under more scrutiny. Further to what you wrote, some airlines have even been blacklisted by e.g. the EU because of safety reasons, like PIA (the flag carrier of Pakistan!) from 2020 to 2023.

I guess cargo tends to go more by ship and passengers tend to go more by plane, but all 4 combinations certainly exist so no need to assume 2 variables are being compared simultaneously.

Which is the country their rules should follow?

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.

I agree it's a tricky problem to solve without agreements in place governing it. The airline industry seems to have settled on you follow the laws of the destination country. Ships in particular though do everything they can to abuse flagging their ships with the most lax working regulations.

The union of the ruleset of the flag country, the source country, and the destination country seems pretty reasonable - you should have to follow all three. Obviously not how it’s currently done, it’s an industry that has been doing it by flagging out of places like Liberia or Mauritania since time immemorial, but we can clearly do better.

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.

(tongue in cheek) isn't that what boeing did with the FAA?

Ships and planes are so different in their regulations and safety measures, it's not even close or comparable.

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