Hacker News Reader

Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com