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Comment by LastTrain | Hacker News Reader

That isn't ever going to happen, and modern airline safety is nothing short of a miracle. There are on the order of 10-20 million flights a year in the US, carrying 900 million passengers. You could take 5 million flights before you could statistically expect to die. This is one of those rare things in the world where a system has been developed that works, and it involves making slow changes with extreme planning and caution.

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This is a typical refrain that I can translate as "we'd solve horrific safety issues and the fear and paranoia about flying if we'd all stop following the news."

But there aren't "horrific" safety issues, as the numbers demonstrate. Stepping onto a US commercial airliner is literally about the safest thing you can do. Watch the news all you want, just understand what you're watching and that if it were normal it wouldn't be news. Nobody is saying there isn't room for improvement, continual improvement in safety is part of the process, and the numbers bear that out.

Indeed, I thought awhile about a way to rephrase that, and it's really just media shaping the perceptions about such. Being in an aircrash seems like a top national nightmare, so 9/11 was super effective in catching our attention.

Tell that to the Potomac victims...you cant can you?

I'm not in a position to tell them anything. If I were, I would try and convey that I understand nothing can replace what they've lost, but the cause of the accident will be investigated and determined. Recommendations from that investigation will result in procedures being added to cannon of safety measures to help prevent future similar tragedies. What would you tell them?

The Potomac crash was terrible, horrible.

However, on average there's that many car crash victims in the US in less than 24 hours.

There's been ~10 times as many fatalities from car crashes (going by averages here) since the Potomac crash as there was in the Potomac crash.

And yet there aren't huge news articles about how we're investigating and going to fix it...

> And yet there aren't huge news articles about how we're investigating and going to fix it...

Of course we ain't. How else could Tesla be so efficient?

That turned out to be the fault of the helicopter pilot, who was flying above the allowed limit.

The cause of that accident has not been determined, and when it is it won't be as simplistic as that.

Sure, the sensors collecting the altitude data might have been faulty, but the helicopter pilot was reportedly 50% higher than was allowed. You would think that an experienced helicopter pilot would be able to gauge that they were a full 50% above the allowed limit. From the reported information, I'm not sure there is reason to believe that it was much more complicated than altitude misjudgement on the part of the helicopter pilot, unless they were somehow unaware of the allowed limits in that airspace.

If something was caused by pilot error, there's nothing you can really do except shrug and hope it doesn't happen again. It's an intuitively appealing explanation, and usually wrong. The aviation community has spent decades rejecting that instinct and looking for contributing factors that can be addressed. Those other factors are almost always present, and improvements can then be made. The net result of this process is that aviation has become incredibly safe, which would not have happened if people were content to say "eh, it was probably pilot error."

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