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Comment by Krssst | Hacker News Reader

Uncontrolled fire in a plane is almost certain death if you don't land within minutes. You cannot land once the fire takes out the cables necessary for flight controls. Airplanes can still operate until landing after various mistreatments but uncontrolled fire is not one of them.

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What are the odds that a lithium battery would cause uncontrolled fire? We are around them daily, ever since the 80s-90s , to this day I have never seen one in person.

Look at this guy, he puts a screwdriver through phones for show off on youtube, intentionally damaging the battry...nothing dangerous or uncontrolled happens, the little smoke is the equivalent of a couple of cigarettes.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gcjfJfbOVkY

And all the psychological tests on pilots, no train or bus pilot has to go through the same stuff even though they have a similar number of souls on board

I'll go to my grave claiming that aviation has to fight for its existence on a daily basis by clearing impossible standards because people are scared , intuitively scared of flight as humans aren't supposed to be able to do that and all our ancestors who tried failed miserably by falling off a tree or something.

The percentage of people who get the physics of why a plane flies are less than 1% of those who ever flew, and that is not even the majority of the 9 billion humans yet, hell not even a quarter.

"If your phone falls through the seats DON'T TRY TO RECOVER IT as the seat (which is fixed) might damage it and cause a fire" lmao

Next thing they'd be making announcements on how to seat as a particularly fat individual missing their seat could land on their ass and fall through the fusolage causing a decompression...give me a break

Non-zero:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6

> The report indicated that the fire was caused by the autoignition of the contents of a cargo pallet that contained more than 81,000 lithium batteries and other combustible materials

So we just need to limit to 80,999 power banks on a plane at once

Aviation rules are written in blood. Everything you snidely dismiss actually happened and people died/came close to dying, so the rule was added.

What about all other means of transportation?

Is the blood shed by aviation more red or more special then?

It's not, it's the fact that the whole concept of flight goes against human intuition so it will always feel fishy and unsafe , even though the physics is much sounder and I'd say even safer than all other forms of transportation

There are reasons more than a million people die on the roads every year, but that number only cracks a thousand for commercial aviation in particularly bad years. Most of those reasons are that all aviation incidents and accidents are analyzed to inform how the industry operates, but for road accidents we just shrug and say, "people die in accidents, whatever can we do?"

Exaclty. And this is fucking wrong and insane because the goal of a human should be not to die, not to avoid a particular type of death (eg. aviation death) . It's not like if you die on the car drive to the airport or because you are stabbed in the subway it's okay because you respawn

This is the same cognitive failure that happens with

Sharks v. Mosquitos and

Nuclear v. Fossil fuels

It seems to me you are defending the cognitive failure instead of arguing for the re-establishment of risk/reward parity also considering the enormous benefits of aviation which enables us to get from one point of the globe to the opposite in less than a day

That's an interesting windmill you've constructed whole-cloth from what was written.

Speaking for rail safety alone: rules are written in hypothetical blood. The FRA and similar bodies in CAN and EU are VERY proactive about safety, as are the light rail train companies themselves.

In fact, new safety regs are often suggested by rail companies, who observe previously-unexpected situations IRL (despite the best attempts to nail these down in advance).

You're enjoying tossing around a lot of "What if"s, out of ignorance, but modern transit safety is not based on some dude sitting around and thinking up rules for funsies. It's a highly intensive engineering process, with multiple layers of cross-checking.

And then millions of us get behind the wheel, and there's nothing anyone can do about decisions made by each of them. Car safety is based on the hope people fear getting tickets, and some soft design aids.

> > Speaking for rail safety alone: rules are written in hypothetical blood. The FRA and similar bodies in CAN and EU are VERY proactive about safety, as are the light rail train companies themselves.

Trains make thousands of victims each year, I think worldwide the number borders the 10,000 from all causes and nobody gets on their case like planes which in a good year make 0 victims per year worldwide

So you have it the other way around, the hypotetical blood is the aviation one and the real blood is the one shed by trains and yet the scare factor is all on planes

So should we increase the "scare factor" on rail transport or reduce it on air transport?

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