Why you shouldn’t sell any product to an American (MU-2 crash in Oklahoma) | Hacker News Reader

Why you shouldn’t sell any product to an American (MU-2 crash in Oklahoma)

blogs.law.harvard.edu

25 pointsjessaustin21 comments

There is something about airplane crashes that makes survivors rich. Apparently lives lost in an airplane are worth more than lives lost in an auto accident for some reason.

The thing is all of this litigation is built into the cost of everything that gets certified to go into an airplane. Items cost about 10x of what you think they should cost.

Things as simple as an altimeter end up costing over a thousand dollars.

You're going to have to present some evidence to show just how much of this increased cost is due to litigation.

Aircraft parts are made & tested to a higher standard. This obviously costs more.

This may be a stupid question, but what are the costs and risks of military-style ejection seats in small planes like these? I'm always a little surprised that the wealthy can buy fairly expensive planes but there's no cost room for features that may save their lives during a stall or engine failure one can't recover from.

It would make the plan heavier, for one. It would increase the cost and complexity of the aircraft. It would likely reduce the comfort of the aircraft because it would have to have a place where the plane opens directly above the pilot.

You could also argue it would make flying less safe if a pilot could easily and safely ditch his plane whenever he wanted to. That plane has to come down somewhere, either in a populated area by itself or in a corn field with a pilot behind the controls.

Military style ejection seats are dangerous and require training to use properly, and even with training they regularly break the limbs of the people who are forced to use them.

If the pilot & passengers eject, you still have the liability of a now pilot-less airplane coming down in a populated area at high speed.

Small prop planes can get whole-plane parachutes installed[1], and by all accounts they work very well. They get certified by type, so the owner of one of these Mitsubishis would have to check to see if it was approved for their plane.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_Recovery_Systems

Reading the comments provides more information. One commenter even called the plane a widow maker.

According to wikipedia the risk is that this plane doesn't handle like other planes its size in stalled or low speed scenarios. So you have this very unique fail state at work here. Now comes the question of liability. Should pilots just have known better? Who to blame?

I think if you build something that's easy to crash for even the most experienced pilots, then the design is to blame. Reminds of UI arguments devs get into end users with. "Oh they should have know to click on that box here and there and to scroll over here! Stupid users!"

Uh, no.

I think litigation and payouts here are a very, very good thing. It'll make future designers worry about building in unique fail states that most pilots can't handle. If it means extra cost to avoid it, fine, now you have an incentive and a way to sell it to management, "Hey guys, we don't want to sued to death like Mitsubishi was or get the stigma of a MU-2 here."

Serious question: if this thing kills so many pilots, even experienced ones working for the military... why is it still being manufactured, sold, and flown?

A new MU-2 hasn't rolled off the line for almost 30 years.

If you're a pilot you've heard about the MU-2 and its flight characteristics, The aircraft requires specific training that once implemented drastically reduced the crash statistics. This pilot made an incredibly stupid decision, flying an aircraft with no real flight time (11.5 is nothing) and he paid for his hubris with his life.

Edit: here's an article on the MU-2 that does a good job to talking about the issue with the aircraft from a pilots perspective without assuming too much flight knowledge on the reader's part: http://www.flyingmag.com/safety/training/dangerous-airplanes...

Not disputing the likelihood of pilot error, but note that the pilot had nearly 3000 hours of flight time. From the linked Oklahoma 6 story: "The NTSB says Inhofe [the pilot] had a total of 2,874 flight hours, with more than half of those in multiengine airplanes."

It looks like the FAA has decided “pilot experience in other aircraft types cannot be used to comply with MU-2 operational requirements.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_MU-2#Safety_Concerns

One of the points made in the gp's link is that there are flight characteristics of the MU-2 that are different than other dual engine planes.

One loud statement is this:

The fact that lack of training is the primary cause of the high MU-2 accident rate is supported by other data. In Europe, where the equivalent of a type rating is required to fly an MU-2, the accident rate is less than half the rate in the United States.

He only had 11+ hours in the MU-2... total flight time doesn't matter.

It hasn't been manufactured since 1986 [1]

Perhaps because of its safety record, used planes are very cheap for the performance - in some cases half the price of other aircraft of the same age, top speed, number of passengers, and engine configuration [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_MU-2 [2] http://www.anacondaaviation.com/techpages/PDF/1I.BROCHURES%2...

"Unless what Angelley is saying is not true, which I doubt – as an officer of the court, he would surely never lie."

Oh, snap!

What does an individuals action's have anything to do with the general population?

We hear about lawsuits often enough in the USA, and rarely enough in other countries, that one can't ignore the difference. (Which is not to say it's a true difference - it could be one of reporting, say. But it's something that requires explanation)

No amount of laws, regulation, or common sense, can prevent people from being stupid. The end result is, don't sell dangerous products that the general population may one day acquire if said product can be cause of death or dismemberment.

Honestly the story doesn't seem fit for HN, it pretty much only reinforces the idea that people will sue whomever has the money regardless of who is at fault.

If you build the wrong kind of item, it only takes one bad customer with a litigious streak (or one dead customer with a litigious family) to ruin you in the US.

The title of this submission seems a bit sensationalized, probably as click-bait.

A more accurate title would be less titillating, e.g. "Inexperienced pilot crashes, family sues plane manufacturer".

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