How odd is a cluster of plane accidents?
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I'm also happy to see some at least slightly non-trivial statistics in the mainstream.
One glaring point though: the liklihood of another crash might not be high given whatever statistics, but those don't reflect the fact that someone shot a missile at one of those planes. I might risk a flight in Africa or Taiwan or where-ever, but you won't see me flying anywhere near Russia/Ukraine anytime soon even though people obviously thought this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Actually most flights from Europe to East Asia fly over Russia now while carefully avoiding Ukrainian airspace.
So if you really need there and want to avoid Russian airspace, you'll have to fly via Africa or Americas or possibly transsiberian rail.
By glancing at flightradar24: Everybody is scared to fly over Ukraine, except for Russian (Transaero) and some Turkish planes bound to Russia who fly over central Ukraine just fine.
(Oh, now, don’t get me wrong, were I to fly through this region I would be more scared than I would otherwise be. However, that would be irrational on my part and in many ways an involuntary reaction and no reason to change my plans.)
This bet turned out to be bad, very bad.
I don't know of the economics involved, but I'm guessing that, aside from political reasons, the different flight paths avoiding this would have cost the airlines enough to where they didn't want to do it. Which is pretty disturbing...
The again, you don't need war to have air defenses shot down a civilian passenger jet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812
That's not what they were betting on at all.
They were assuming (incorrectly, as we now know) that the rebels would have smaller missiles, for example shoulder fired missiles like Stingers. Those missiles are able to shoot down planes flying at lower altitude, but they are unable to reach an aircraft at cruising altitude.
I believe the eastern Ukraine already had a closure for flights under 32,000 feet before MH 017. The military planes that were shoot down in the days before were all flying at much lower altitudes.
Surface to Air missiles that can engage planes at cruising altitude are usually only owned by state actors. They also require specially trained personal to operate them. Obviously both missiles and personal were available to whoever shot down MH 017.
I hope they stay away from Israel/Gaza airspace as well and not wait for another incident. Maybe airlines should publish their flight paths to the public so that we can make our own decision!
When they're at an altitude that they can be affected by a laser pointer, chances are they're not. The number of aircraft that can do a full Cat III approach with autoland is very small.
http://www.wired.com/2012/12/what-does-randomness-look-like/
But that usually detracts from some of their spiritual/political beliefs and its quickly dismissed.
AFAIK, we never thought that of solar maximums, so if plane crashes happened every three weeks, I doubt we would think them signs of terrible forces.
Also, I would know when not to book a flight, as would everybody else.
I don't think that eclipses are in any sense "controllable".
Time-evolving distribution of time lags between commercial airline disasters[1]
while others disagree:
In the case of plane accidents, the authors of Ref. 7[1] found that the time lag between commercial airline disasters and their occurrence frequency could be well described by time-dependent Poisson events. On the other hand, authors of Ref. 8[3] have found that beyond certain timescales the time dynamics of both plane and car accidents are not Poissonian but instead long-range correlated.[2]
[1]http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0509092
[2]http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.3183
[3]http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437107...
I don't think this affects the probability discussion much, but it's good to call it what it is.
As written, a poisson distribution wouldn't explain this. If you have a crash on day 0, then a crash on day 1 is no more likely than a crash on days 2, 3, etc.
Day 1 is the day most likely to have the next crash, but it's no more likely to have any crash.
(It could easily be the case that Ranter actually found "...just one day after the previous crash than two, three or more days later", and this subtlety got lost somewhere down the line.)
This is even more true when missiles are involved.
An accident is something that happens unintentionally. Though I'm sure many crashes are down to genuine negligence, I'd be surprised if most crashes are deliberate, even indirectly (e.g. "Whoops! I've cross-threaded this bolt, oh well, I'm sure it will be fine" vs "Ha Ha! I'll cross-threaded this bolt. That'll make the plane crash one day!").
It seems to me that when people use 'accident' to describe something they are trying to remove attribution or disconnect causes.
Language is so hard. It's no wonder communication is the cause of most of your conflicts.
Just like when a car is blown up by driving over a mine, we don't call that a "car accident" or "traffic accident".
Doh?
That's all just arguing semantics though. I even agree with you that the term "accident" is not correct, despite what I wrote above. (Although I don't agree with your reasoning behind it). I'd prefer the term "incident".
The world is coddling Putin for fear of losing his economic ties into countries that control the editorial content of much of the Western press. So we say 'accident' and we say 'supposed' ties to Russia, and we say blatant lies like 'Nazi party has taken over the Ukraine' in Western papers.
Sadly, Putin's money is held above morals and truth in Europe. Especially in Germany and France.
[1]: http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/International_security_affairs/o...
But it is somewhat tempered by the significant anti-American sentiment that we've been experiencing for a bit now. I never thought I'd see this, but it's much, much worse than when Rumsfeld talked about "old Europe" (although that was probably overblown in the European press, I don't think Americans ever understood how damaging that was).
Luckily every few years one of the big TV stations is producing another emotional, uplifting "good American" film like http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Luftbr%C3%BCcke_%E2%80%93_N... and in those times you still feel how close we are to the U.S.
It's not like we're programming, where (hopefully) 2 != two != "two" != "2"
Why is a crash on 3 August dependent on there being no crash on 2 August? Surely there could be crashes on both 2 August and 3 August.
It sells better. [1]
[1]: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why...
What's actually a far bigger coincidence is that there were no fatal 777 crashes in the first 20 years of a >1200 aircraft production run until this year, when two aircraft belonging to the same airline were both total losses in apparently unrelated cases of apparent foul play. Whilst I can't conceive any conspiracy theory linking the two that would be credible even by the low standards of the average conspiracy theory, that's a far bigger statistical anomaly.
Yea, I think people will buy that.
Minimum standards are high - and well respected. But if you shave off costs - even if each one is trivial - put back investment, dial back on the training, will I have a cumulative effect?
In short, when will air travel trend towards rail and road for accidents ?
It hasn't. They're safer than ever.
But keep in mind that while airliners are very robust against all kinds of mechanical failures, human errors, and natural events, they are not designed to withstand battle damage or to have any sort of countermeasures. Their only safety from attack is they fly at high altitude, out of range of small arms.
Now here's a scary question: when you want to give someone a bonus because of their successful performance over the last 6 months, how likely is it that their string success is a coincidence?
You're forced to make a similar conclusion, and if you don't, think about why you have the bias you do.
You recognize the truth: that your whole team is responsible for working together to solve the problems of the company, which are necessarily complex and large (otherwise, you'd only need one person) and individual salaries are based on their baseline skills and abilities in that context.
Visible public reward of individuals for work that's perceived (and truly required) to be a team effort is visibly detrimental.
- MH 17 http://www.aeroinside.com/item/4365/malaysia-b772-near-donet...
- Transasia in Taiwan http://www.aeroinside.com/item/4389/transasia-at72-at-makung...
- Swiftair MD 83 in Africa http://www.aeroinside.com/item/4393/swiftair-md83-over-mali-...
Obviously a civilian plane being shot down would lie outside this theory (he suggested more plane crashes were due to pilot depression than mechanical fault/other factors).
"Why does a psychiatric expert on these phenomena personally advise mainstream media outlets about how to handle these situations - and they do exactly the opposite time and again?" [1]
For example, 2 days after a suicide appearing on the news, it is significantly (don't remember the exact numbers) more likely for there to be a plane crash. He attributes this to the fact that some pilots that have had suicidal thoughts are triggered by the suicidal news.
Another interesting study looked at how mortality rates of car accidents are higher after suicide-related news. This study found a surprising number of car deaths in which the driver was stepping on the gas pedal, instead of the break, which might be an indicator of suicide.
Murder-suicides leads to more "accidents" with head-on crashes etc., while "clean" suicides with nobody else involved tends to lead to an increase in "accidents" that don't risk other peoples life.
"Influence" is a fantastic book. Though it's downright chilling in how it tears apart the illusion of how much control we have of how we act.
So if another crash occurs are we allowed start the conspiracy theories?
https://fc.deltasd.bc.ca/~dmatthews/FOV2-00074762/S02DB0598....
If we postulate that, now absent the selection pressures that have shaped human intelligence over the last few million years or so, human intelligence is likely to decline, then we can ask ourselves where this decline might be likely to first show up in the chaotic system of human endeavour.
One possible answer is that it will appear first at the boundary layers: the places where a critical level of human intelligence is required to keep a complicated task operating.
I propose that flying passenger aircraft is such a task. A critical level of intelligence must be maintained by a very large number of people in order to keep passenger aircraft in the air. Everyone, from designers to manufacturers, to QC, to maintenance to pilots to airline management has to function above a certain critical level to perpetuate the activity.
It is possible that clusters of aircraft accidents are purely random and part of the complex system that is air travel. However, it is possible that clusters of aviation accidents represent crossings of the boundary layer resulting from the change in a global factor, like human intelligence, that has moved the entire system probabilistically.
The details of some recent accidents should give us pause. The series of over-control/mis-control accidents including AF447, Colgan Air and others defy reasonable explanation, and they appear to have no precedent in recent passenger aviation. MH370 and MH17, so far as we can see, have no reasonable explanation other than unaccountable human behaviour (failing to communicate over the course of seven hours flying in the case of MH370, and navigating over a war zone in the case of MH17).
It is possible, although certainly not provable at this point, that we are simply becoming too stupid (in general) to fly passenger aircraft safely. It may be time to switch to fully automated aircraft systems.
Sure, anything is possible. But your theory involves so many leaps that it's difficult to take seriously.