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...as you might think.

I'm not sure where your stats came from, but world-wide there were WAAAY more than 83 fatalities in 2000. There were even more fatalities than that in 1945 when commercial airline service was in its infancy and passenger volumes were vrey low (no jumbo jets).

The link I supplied only counts commercial, multi-engine airliner accidents. There are likely many more airplane fatalities then that--military, spacecraft and non-commercial or crew-only flights (trainers, cargo flights, bush pilots, crop dusters, leisure/personal aircraft etc). Add those in world-wide and a worldwide annual death rate over 10,000 is possible, which would make a 1:4500 probablility over 100 years a reasonable statistic.

The chance you'll die on any particular flight is still very remote--almost down to 1 in a half-million.

I still don't know how one could say the chances of a catastrophic armageddon-type event is 10 times more likely than that however, given there's never been such an event in recorded history--ice ages only occur once in several millenia for example. One can surmise about things (terrorists setting off nukes creating nuclear winter, or an asteroid scientists did not see coming) but there is no hard data to analyse (how many organisms were wiped out in the last ice age...when the dinosaurs disappeared, etc? We have no way of knowing for sure).

Do you really think that five guys armed with box cutters are going to be able to kill a plane full of people with nothing to lose? Or two guys armed with guns?

Look no further than the ValuJet, now renamed "AirTran" because of the bad publicity. There was an oxygen explosion, which caused "smoke in the cockpit". The aircraft plunged into the Florida Everglades in the 90's, killing everyone onboard.

This accident was purely from negligence, rather than terrorism. You won't find me flying on AirTran anytime soon.

You can find info and transcripts here: ValuJet 592 - The "Preventable Accident"

Pilots crash planes more often, but controller errors can and do result in crashes (not always sole cause, but then there is usually combination of factors in an air crash). Eg.

Milan SAS http://www.iasa.com.au/folders/Safety_Issues/RiskM anagement/Linatelookingback.html

Swiss Skyguide ATC crash http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2125838.st m (if both pilots had ignored ATC and followed onboard TCAS instructions, crash would have been avoided)

Tenerife http://aviation-safety.net/database/1977/770327-1. htm

NASA has nothing on airline oopses: Gilmi I wonder how many other disasters of this type don't end up with enough survivors to tell how it happened.

The pilots put the aircraft in a mode suitable for the planned flyby, rather than for a landing. Specifically they disconnected the "alpha floor" inhibitor so that their display would not be spoilt by computer inputs.

The major cause of the crash was that the flyby occurred lower than intended, due to a discrepancy in the altimeter display. The radiosonde reported the correct height, but this was not observed or heard by the pilots, who were relying on the faulty bariometric display. Consequently they were lower than surrounding obstacles and were unable to regain full power in time to escape impact.

A report may be seen here and a discussion on the debate over the crash may be seen here.

Exactly. The problem however, is when pilots (or air controllers) rely on instruments they believe to be accurate and have no way of knowing whether this is true. In some instrument landing system (ILS) landings, it is virtually impossible to land without the instruments or verify all the parameters.

This is why they call them "instrument landings", and without them we wouldn't be able to fly in bad weather at all. A good percentage of all flights are flown under instrument flight rules and there's no higher incidence of accidents during bad weather as during good weather (at least not in countries with modern airline fleets).

All instruments have backups that take measurements in a different way than the primary instruments (all modern commercial planes have both radar and standard altimeters, for example). Some of them have so much redundancy that pilots forget how to use the backup instruments, and this in itself has been responsible for a few accidents.

Instrument flight in itself is not the problem, and pilots are trained, and trained well, in what to do if and when their instruments fail (and instrument failure is fairly common - planes are even allowed to take off with certain instruments broken). The problem is, as always, the human factor, and at times human behavior will cause a completely avoidable crash that would at first glance seem to be the fault of poor or broken instrumentation. In fact I can't even recall a crash that could be fully blamed on broken instruments - unless a pilot literally loses everything (which would entail a complete electronics failure and simultaneous failure of various physical sensors on the outside of the aircraft linked with old-style analog backup instruments), he or she is trained in how to fly and land that plane.

To put a twist on it... a pressure seal on a 747 (I believe I'll have to double check) faild and people died. When the Boeing engineer who had designed it found it it was a design fault caused by him, he comitted suicide. Not that I believe engineers should commit seppuku when things go wrong, but...

The accident you recall - which killed 520 people - was this one. It was a botched repair, not a design flaw. I guess seppuku would be somehow appropriate considering it was a JAL flight.

So, would an Airbus allow a suicidal pilot to, say, crash a plane-load of people into the Atlantic Ocean? Or is that just a feature of 767s?

For reference, I don't see any Airbuses in the list of accidents by pilot-induced dive.

Especially do not claim that safety-critical systems are hack-proof, since even people who wouldn't normally try to hack them will try.

It does not even need evildoers to defeat safety-critical systems of some complexity. Consider for instance the 1993 Warshaw accident of a Lufthansa A320 (see also this report). Amongst its causes was a safety system meant to prevent deployment of reverse thrust and spoilers unless the plane had its wheels down on the runway. Which makes sense in principle because trying to stop a plane in mid-air is not a good idey, but turned out to be, uh, not quite helpful when this accident happened.

Now one may argue that this particular problem, or any particular problem, could be fixed by improving the systems' design. However, complexity of the system, and of the problem to be solved, makes it unlikely that even the smartest engineers will get it right soon. Now add evil minds to your considerations.

In the case discussed here, an obvious weakness is the need for location-awareness. What if the plane "thinks" it is elsewehre? This issue is addressed in the article, but I do not really see how they are going to solve it. What if the plane "thinks" it is inside such a soft wall, or surrounded by no-fly zones? What if the plane is Air Force One and has an actual reason to enter a no-fly zone? What if the plane just "believes" it might have been Air Force One in a former life? Not to mention the fact that such a system does not prevent the root problem: planes can still be hijacked. Maybe the next hijacked plane hits airport buildings then, killing as many people as the WTC attack did?

A computer, properly programmed, can be relied upon to do the right thing.

You have high confidence in programmers.

As for Airbus jets: most airplane crashes occur due to pilot error. Others occur due to mechanical failure. Very few accidents of any sort have ever occurred due to computer failure. Therefore, I would think that a computer, which probably has a much better grip on the situation, given that airplanes have hundreds of sensors that a pilot could not possibly monitor simultaneously, is better prepared to make certain decisions.

Isn't one accident, one too many? I'm not insisting that the computer not have a part in the system--I'm suggesting that these fly-by-wire systems should not be so rigid as to completely lock-out the human factor.

When pilots can recount a few stories (enough to merit an entire television program) where they had to fight with the computer to either get it to recognize that either its input or actions were wrong, I'd say the system has some serious design flaws (linked article is long, but very informative).

And until we (as the human race) have acheived complete infallibility, the system will continue to have design flaws.

This is a real good thing, in my opinion.

I can see your side of things, but with computers becoming more and more ubiquitous, I think there's a real danger to assuming that a computer is always going to do the right thing. Especially as a programmer, I find my trust of computer programs to do that "Right Thing" declining every day.

The Airbus problem can be even worse than your usual Microsoft Word spell checker screwup, because of the complexity of the interface. In this case, it got some 250 or so people killed.

I agree that it is very hard to fit through a window. Unfortunately, that only means that being forced through one would be rather painful.

For a real example, when a cockpit window blows out, British Airways flight 5390. This link doesn't describe the event itself in much detail, but I do remember that he only survived through a pretty heroic effort by the flight attendants (like, his ankles were severly bruised from where they were holding onto him, all his clothes were blown off, etc). And this was only at 17,300 ft, it would have been much worse (certainly fatal) at 30,000 ft - even if the pilot had not been blown completely out of the aircraft he would have died of hypoxia after a matter of minutes.

See also an interesting article on decompression

I didn't spend long searching, but I couldn't find any real examples of incidents involving bad things happening with cabin windows, I wouldn't be surprised if the worst-case scanario (window blowing out while plane is cruising at high altitude) hasn't happened yet: the biggest danger is when the aircraft is ascending or descending and the pressure difference is changing rapidly. But this is less catastrophic than a depressurization at high altitude.

I might be an ignoramus, but I haven't heard of plane safety equipment (life jackets, oxygen masks) being successfully used in an emergency situation on a large commerical aircraft.

A DC-9, operating as ALM 980 , ran out of fuel and mostly-successfully [there were issues with the preparation that probably cost lives] ditched in the Caribbean 30 miles off St. Croix on May 2, 1970. Of the 63 on board, 40 survived.

The Ethiopian Airlines 767 that was hijacked and crashed off the Comoros Islands also had a chance to ditch, if the flight crew hadn't been busy fighting the hijackers while trying to fly the plane.

PROBABLE CAUSE: "The KLM aircraft had taken off without take-off clearance, in the absolute conviction that this clearance had been obtained, which was the result of a misunderstanding between the tower and the KLM aircraft. This misunderstanding had arisen from the mutual use of usual terminology which, however, gave rise to misinterpretation. In combination with a number of other coinciding circumstances, the premature take-off of the KLM aircraft resulted in a collision with the Pan Am aircraft, because the latter was still on the runway since it had missed the correct intersection."

..or I would not have found this gem! The Aviation Safety Network a must-visit site for everyone with a flight phobia! Get this: it has all the latest fatal accidents on the front page. Heaps of material for freaking people out pre-flight. Definite bookmark material.

Anyhoow, there's a massive accident database with 6350 airliner "write-offs" from 1945! I'd be interested to know if whoever made this sight has a little, er, "problem" with flying. Anyway to see whose planes were better when it comes to safety (which was the original point), go here the statistics page. It's a bit complicated, so I couldn't be bothered going through American and European models. BTW: think twice before boarding a Boeing S.307 Stratoliner.

..or I would not have found this gem! The Aviation Safety Network a must-visit site for everyone with a flight phobia! Get this: it has all the latest fatal accidents on the front page. Heaps of material for freaking people out pre-flight. Definite bookmark material.

Anyhoow, there's a massive accident database with 6350 airliner "write-offs" from 1945! I'd be interested to know if whoever made this sight has a little, er, "problem" with flying. Anyway to see whose planes were better when it comes to safety (which was the original point), go here the statistics page. It's a bit complicated, so I couldn't be bothered going through American and European models. BTW: think twice before boarding a Boeing S.307 Stratoliner.

Canada is rated Category 1 (meeting ICAO standards) in FAA's International Aviation Safety Assessment Program (IASA). Air Canada, the biggest airline in Canada, last had a fatal accident in 1983, but it was in Cincinati, Ohio. The last accident in Canada was in 1978. Air Transit, and WestJet have never had a fatal accident. Canada 3000, and Roots Air, which both went defunct last year, never had a fatality in their operating lifetimes either. I can't think of another Canadian Airline.

The Concorde has a history of tire problems. When the crash happened last year, it was due to debris from the Concorde's own blown tire perforating the fuel tank, which led to the ignition of the leaking fuel.

Now, I'm no aeronautical engineer, but i'd say that when a flying chunk of blown tire can punch a hole in your fuel tank and lead to the loss of the entire aircraft and the death of all souls aboard, that's a pretty Goddamned major design flaw.

You might as well have said, "...the Ford Pinto's tendency to go up in flames was always due to a rear-impact, not a major design flaw."

~Philly

I think you are full of shit. Here's a list of all 747's taken out of service, and (for most) the reason why:
http://aviation-safety.net/datab ase/type/104.shtml

You tell me which the other two are.

AARRGGHHH!
Airbus airplanes have many problems to do with computer control of the systems; however this accident did not depend directly on this computer control. But first, a few facts:

• Three people were killed, not all. (There were 136 people on board, 130 + 6 crew.)
• The flight control system has no way of `detecting a smooth surface.'
• the landing gear was down and the speed was too low.

In brief, the problem was that there was management pressure on the pilots to give "a good show". The pilots were too low (50 feet) and too slow, with engines at flight idle. The pilots were complacent and did not follow checklists. They overrode the flight control system, and did it too long; by the time the crew realised the trees were too close, well, the trees were too close. Those big turbofan engines take a little while to spool up, so even though the CVR [Cockpit Voice Recorder] transcript mentions things like TOGA - Take-Off/Go-Around power, they did it all too late.

This accident actually is related to the topic of the thread but not in the way you think it is. The lessons are:

1. don't let management pressure you into showing off and doing unrealisitc things; and
2. don't rely too much on those automatic protection systems, especially when you override them. (Think how many times you have done something stupid while thinking you were an unpriv. user and then realised you had su'ed while you make that frantic reach for Ctrl-C...)

Here are some links:

The Accident Report
The CVR transcript

PS: The HCF instruction was a joke, son!

AARRGGHHH!
Airbus airplanes have many problems to do with computer control of the systems; however this accident did not depend directly on this computer control. But first, a few facts:

• Three people were killed, not all. (There were 136 people on board, 130 + 6 crew.)
• The flight control system has no way of `detecting a smooth surface.'
• the landing gear was down and the speed was too low.

In brief, the problem was that there was management pressure on the pilots to give "a good show". The pilots were too low (50 feet) and too slow, with engines at flight idle. The pilots were complacent and did not follow checklists. They overrode the flight control system, and did it too long; by the time the crew realised the trees were too close, well, the trees were too close. Those big turbofan engines take a little while to spool up, so even though the CVR [Cockpit Voice Recorder] transcript mentions things like TOGA - Take-Off/Go-Around power, they did it all too late.

This accident actually is related to the topic of the thread but not in the way you think it is. The lessons are:

1. don't let management pressure you into showing off and doing unrealisitc things; and
2. don't rely too much on those automatic protection systems, especially when you override them. (Think how many times you have done something stupid while thinking you were an unpriv. user and then realised you had su'ed while you make that frantic reach for Ctrl-C...)

Here are some links:

The Accident Report
The CVR transcript

PS: The HCF instruction was a joke, son!