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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Are the increased number of air incidents since Dec 2024 reflective of anything real or is it more attention on something? Brigida v. USDOT comes to mind but doesn't seem relevant. I'm sure we could all construct a chain of "this thing happened that caused that which caused this" and so on, but I'm curious if someone has done the effort to see whether such a chain is defensible.

Also, did the pilots die in the collision or in some sort of aftermath? The cockpit looks absolutely smashed.

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You can probably construct a realistic chain of failure that goes all the way back to political tomfoolery and bad air traffic control leadership/staffing decisions, but that makes the wrong people look bad, so they'll probably blame individuals further down the totem pole like the controller or pilot and call it a day.

Ah so you think it is Brigida. I get what you mean. I had to obscure that in order to ask the question.

No, absolutely not. This has nothing to do with Brigida. I'm not being vague here. When I say political tomfoolery and leadership decisions, I'm not alluding to race or discrimination. I am talking about more plausible and straightforward causes: their decisions to not modernize ATC, and to keep ATC staffed at a skeleton level for decades.

I see. Who are the “wrong people” then? Pointing fingers at politicians over lack of funding is so routine I doubt any of them would be more than mildly inconvenienced by that. Certainly not to the degree where they’d conspire to hide it.

The wrong people would be the class that never seems to take the fall: Director+ decisionmakers and policymakers.

I am not aware of any data that supports the claim that there are more incidents in recent history. The safest years were, of course, the COVID-19 shutdown years, when air-travel was greatly reduced. But besides that the last couple of years has been overall safer than the years before COVID-19.

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

The 2025 crash near DCA, of course, absolutely spiked the number of recent commercial aviation deaths, but we haven't had any other aviation tragedies of that magnitude in more than a decade.

This can be a preventable tragedy without there needing to be a conspiracy behind it.

Not a conspiracy. A mistake. E.g. no one wanted the screwworm fly to invade NA. It was a result of factory shutdowns. That kind of ultimate cause was what I was curious about.

Your link is global not American which wouldn’t really show the effect if it was a change in US policy. But Googling you’re right, the premise is wrong.

https://www.ntsb.gov/pages/monthly.aspx

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