Slashdot Mirror

Any word on whether they're using better glue than on the A300-600 and A310, or at a stronger vertical stabilizer?

"The FDR onboard the aircraft records many different operating conditions of the flight. By regulation, newly manufactured aircraft must monitor at least eighty-eight important parameters such as time, altitude, airspeed, heading, and aircraft attitude. In addition, some FDRs can record the status of more than 1,000 other in-flight characteristics that can aid in the investigation. The items monitored can be anything from flap position to auto-pilot mode or even smoke alarms.

With the data retrieved from the FDR, the Safety Board can generate a computer animated video reconstruction of the flight. The investigator can then visualize the airplane's attitude, instrument readings, power settings and other characteristics of the flight."

Considering the American defense system isn't allowed to shoot down planes unless they're headed for the White House or what have you, that would have made little difference.

False. For an example, look at the Payne Stewart incident from 1999. When that plane went out of control, multiple Air National Guard fighters followed alongside, ready to shoot it if it started to threaten Pierre, SD.

Computers also don't often:

4) black out at the helm while the backup computer is AWOL.

Allision of Staten Island Ferry Andrew J. Barberi

Pilot Richard Smith blacked out at the helm. Captain Michael Gansas was absent -- his duty station was in the forward wheelhouse to backup Smith, but he wasn't there. As a result of this double human failure, 11 people died.

Humans do fail, and so do computers. I don't think Smith's weakness was excusable but I have sympathy for him. Humans do fail, excusably or inexcusably. That's why the DOT pays a second human pilot to be in the wheelhouse during docking, but Gansas wasn't even there.

SabreTech was considered qualified before the accident. As a maintenance shop, they had to be certified the FAA as well as approved to do the maintenance for ValuJet by ValuJet's POI (an FAA employee in charge of making sure the airline complies with regulation). While ValuJet is responsible for making sure SabreTech does it's job, they can not check every maintenance item, nor are they supposed to. This is like the FAA making sure the airline complies with it's operating specifications but the FAA doesn't watch every single thing going on. It's impossible. The crash was caused by oxygen generators placed onboard without notice to the crew, which was an illegal action by the single employee of SabreTech who packed the container. There was also some fault placed with the airplane manufacturer for not having any way to detect a fire in that part of the cargo hold. In any case, according to the NTSB all parties involved, SabreTech, ValuJet, and the FAA were faulted. I worded my statement badly and you are right about it also being ValuJet's fault. This accident is why AirTran and many other airlines now do all their maintenance in house. NTSB report

Unfortunately, in spite of all your speculation, you are wrong. Please refer to this NTSB incident report. Particularly the line that reads, " Fifty-one prior incidents of laser irradiations to pilots have been recorded by the Las Vegas air traffic facility over the past 2 years."

It's not the parachute that caused the plane crash. Rather, the parachute failed to prevent the plane from crashing. Learn the damn difference. Nine times out of ten, the actual cause of the crash is pilot error, like grandparent post already explained. It's actually much higher than nine out of ten, if you read the NTSB aircraft accident reports. It's usually a VFR pilot with "go fever", who risks flying in snow or at night over water to get back home in time so the ball & chain won't give them an earful. Or they thought they had enough gas in the tank, or they did but had to divert around bad weather or they were off course because they forgot to periodically reset their gyro compass. All mistakes that could have been easily avoided, had the pilot done the proper preflight, trip planning, and cockpit awareness routines. And none that have anything at all to do with optional safety devices.

If you pull a bonehead maneuver that risks your life, be fucking grateful someone gave you a second chance. Don't sue them, or next time they won't help you. It's asshats like this that are the reason we need Good Samaritan laws in the first place.

It's not the parachute that caused the plane crash. Rather, the parachute failed to prevent the plane from crashing. Learn the damn difference. Nine times out of ten, the actual cause of the crash is pilot error, like grandparent post already explained. It's actually much higher than nine out of ten, if you read the NTSB aircraft accident reports. It's usually a VFR pilot with "go fever", who risks flying in snow or at night over water to get back home in time so the ball & chain won't give them an earful. Or they thought they had enough gas in the tank, or they did but had to divert around bad weather or they were off course because they forgot to periodically reset their gyro compass. All mistakes that could have been easily avoided, had the pilot done the proper preflight, trip planning, and cockpit awareness routines. And none that have anything at all to do with optional safety devices.

If you pull a bonehead maneuver that risks your life, be fucking grateful someone gave you a second chance. Don't sue them, or next time they won't help you. It's asshats like this that are the reason we need Good Samaritan laws in the first place.

• Interface specifications dominate If it doesn't work the way the spec says it does, fix the box, not the spec. If A won't talk to B, run the tests to check compliance with the spec. If you can't tell who's at fault, the spec is broken. This is why you can swap a Pratt and Whitney engine for a Rolls Royce engine.
• The buyer, not the vendor, decides what is a "defect". One of the fundamental problems in IT is that vendors have sole discretion to decide what is a defect and what isn't. That doesn't fly in aerospace.
• Fix blame. In aerospace, people get blamed for screwing up. You do not want your name or the name of your company to appear in an NTSB crash report. If you screw up big time, it will. Mistakes in aerospace are publicized. There's an NTSB database of 140,000 crashes. If it was a hardware failure, the vendor is named.
• Warranties have real meaning Airplanes come with good warranties, and so do all the parts that go into them. Commercial software doesn't.

It's time for computing to grow up and accept this kind of discipline. The automotive industry had to accept it in the 1960s, and cars got much better within a decade.

the 2 fatalities had little to do with problems in flight, but were rather bizarre accidents in 1995 and 2000

the 2 fatalities had little to do with problems in flight, but were rather bizarre accidents in 1995 and 2000

Which is why most accidents and fatalities involve private pilots with VFR ratings. Their lack of experience or qualifications lands gets them killed when they get into an unfamiliar situation and make a mistake, like JFK Jr.

While people with Airline Transport Pilot's Licenses still make mistakes, they are much fewer and father between because they have 1500 hours of experience and an IFR rating.

It's happened before (sans injury).

like this one UAL , Ontario, CA 1997

or this one UAL Rialto, CA 1997

or this Air taxi reports blue light, 1996

make of it what you will, but it's probably not activity aimed at aircraft specifically.

It's happened before (sans injury).

like this one UAL , Ontario, CA 1997

or this one UAL Rialto, CA 1997

or this Air taxi reports blue light, 1996

make of it what you will, but it's probably not activity aimed at aircraft specifically.

It's happened before (sans injury).

like this one UAL , Ontario, CA 1997

or this one UAL Rialto, CA 1997

or this Air taxi reports blue light, 1996

make of it what you will, but it's probably not activity aimed at aircraft specifically.

It's the turbulence that causes fatigue, not the action of unloading a lot of water at once. If you think about it, when you go flying in an airliner and you hit a bumpy patch of air, it's usually around clouds. The reason clouds usually form is that air (moist air) is rising, and carrying the water vapor up to a height where the temperature drops enough for the water to condense. The point is, the air is RISING. As the plane flies thru this rising air, the direction the wing is encountering the airflow suddenly changes slightly. Not a lot, but enough that the lift on the wings suddenly increases. The lift (the force that holds the plane up) is a function of angle of the airflow to the wing, as well as airspeed squared. So when you increase the angle of airflow, the lift increases. Now you have more lift than weight, so the plane bumps upwards. But the area of rising air is relatively small, so you get a short transient bump.

Over a fire, you've got LOTS of bumpy air - the fire is superheating patches of air, and it's all bumpy and roiling around. All that mess is rising rapidly into the sky, and fresh cold air is rushing in around the edges (remember Backdraft, the movie?), moving downward.

To be an effective air drop platform, you need to fly very low, so that the water doesn't disperse too much before it hits the target zone. So you're deliberately flying an airplane thru extremely unstable (rapidly rising and falling) patches of air, with very large vertical speeds (which means, larger changes in airflow direction, which means more severe turbulence).

As any materials engineer knows, and as most of us geeks know, if you bend something often enough, it breaks. And the further you bend it each time, the faster it breaks. An airplane wing is designed for a certain "fatigue life" - a certain number of cycles of bending. With the above primer on turbulence, you can imagine how drastically different from the design you will be using the airplane when you fly it 500 ft over a forest fire, compared to relatively smooth air at 38,000 ft.

So watch the amazing video from last year of a C130 losing its wings over a fire - it's a natural but hopefully rare consequence of abusing an airplane this way. The way the airplane owner SHOULD handle this is frequent and intensive inspections. That C130, as I recall, was NOT properly inspected and was well past its service life. You can read the NTSB report on that accident at http://www.ntsb.gov/Recs/letters/2004/A04_29_33.pd f (PDF file). A particularly telling quote: "The rate that maneuver load factors between 2.0 and 2.4 were experienced by firefighting aircraft was almost 1,000 times that for aircraft flown as commercial transports." (Load factor is engineer-speak for "g-force" - 1g is normal gravity; most transports never exceed 1.4g except in severe turbulence.)

NTSB report here

A commuter jet is run by a business. With a poor maintenance routine and constant delays/crashes word will get out quickly and the business will fail.

The moral of the story is...Money walks. Dead astronauts talk.

I didn't bother researching any of this until the (great-great-grandparent) post by corebreech. Since then, I read (well skimmed) the NTSB's (PDF) final Flight 800 report. The report is 350 pages of detailed fact finding and experimentation. The report convinced me that these people are professionals who really do know what they are doing.

Otherwise, I agree about the privacy down the drain thing, you can see my other post (actually on subject) below (or at this link).

I didn't bother researching any of this until the (great-great-grandparent) post by corebreech. Since then, I read (well skimmed) the NTSB's (PDF) final Flight 800 report. The report is 350 pages of detailed fact finding and experimentation. The report convinced me that these people are professionals who really do know what they are doing.

Otherwise, I agree about the privacy down the drain thing, you can see my other post (actually on subject) below (or at this link).

To your links, I should like to see something better. So, I dilligently did a search, and maybe government sources aren't your friend. So I figure maybe one conspiracy site deserves another.

Between these two non-government entities, both having belief in the conspiracy view - the divergence of facts is too great for me to fathom. I am left somewhere in the middle, believing myself that the NTSB probably found the culprit. If there were a cover-up, it would seem that they would have been given impirical evidence (planted by the appropriate agency) to clearly show exactly what it was supposed to be. The NTSB official report was not conclusive. Although Section 1.12.7 of the official NTSB report is very good reading. I expect more than this out of a cover-up conspiracy.

Basically, because the NTSB report is not conculsive, there is no convincing you that your position is wrong, and there is no convincing me that it was definately a cover-up.

The NTSB Flight 800 Page seems to have the evidence contrary to your own beliefs, and if you are really nice, and try not to sound like you are a conspiracy theorist, they may let you see the evidence for yourself, under a press pass - or "I'm a collage student writing a paper on", etc. Of course, there have been plenty of (non-government employed) people whom have already seen it, and it's probably been warehoused, but no harm in trying. What I'm saying here, is if you show me proof, I'm on your side, until then - I'm letting you know what I'm basing my beliefs on.

Kindest regards.

Not really. It may surprise you to find out that airplanes aren't remotely airtight. They leak air through door seals, body joints and so forth. For that matter, they aren't even pressurized to maintain ground pressure. The apparent altitude in the cabin at cruise is between 5000 and 8000 feet (which is why you feel the effects of increased altitude, particularly in your ears, despite the pressurization). The pressurization system simply replaces the aircraft's air faster than it leaks. There are valves that regulate how much air enters the aircraft. If you were to put a bullet hole in an aircraft's fuselage, the valves would open a bit more to account for the slightly increased leakage, and that would be the end of it.

That's not to say that you can just shoot anything you want, of course. Putting a bullet through a window could very well take out the whole window, and then you've got a sizable hole. But even this isn't a huge problem, because there is a very simple procedure for dealing with decompression: Descend. You might be interested in the summary final report for Aloha Airlines 243, which lost 18 feet of its fuselage at 24000 feet. Fatalities? One. The aircraft landed safely.

Well, "I rely on God" is probably a close second. Good thing the experts assured us that no religious Muslim would ever commit suicide; otherwise one might imagine that that copilot put the plane in the water deliberately...

I remember listening to a report on NPR by someone from the Illinois equivalent of the NTSB and he had some good reasons for why cell phones are more distracting than stereos or even in-car conversation: Cellphones keep the driver distracted by a non-traffic sensitive other. Most drivers can work the radio without looking at it. Most passengers in the car can see when things are getting hairy traffic-wise and shut the hell up. Random on the cellphone doesn't know where the hell you are and can't tell you about the semi making a wide right.

Realize that even as reliable as GPS is, satellites can give false information. There's a system to counteract this problem, called RAIM, but it requires 4 birds to be visible to detect a problem, and 5 to remove the faulty signal from nav calculations, assuming you have a redundant, GPS-compatible, digital barometric altimeter on board. Otherwise, you need 6 birds visible.

Guidance seems to be relatively straightforward: figure out where you are (with 95% confidence), and aim toward your next waypoint. Here's a quick overview of what that entails:

1. Determine lat/lon for you and the waypoint
2. Determine true (ground) course
3. Determine magnetic course after correcting for the aforementioned deviation
4. Determine magnetic heading after correcting for wind
5. Determine compass heading after correcting for onboard instrument magnetic interference
6. Issue commands to the flight control system to head that way

That leaves flight controls. You need to maintain proper attitude, keeping in mind that there's gonna be turbulence. In order for any magnetic navigation system to properly realigned (remember gyroscopic precession?), you need to be flying straight and level, which requires extensive compensation for unsteady flight dynamics. It's not as simple as saying "pitch up" when your speed gets too high or your altitude is too low. What if you get inverted? It can happen. Even human pilots don't do so well flying instruments only -- see the NTSB findings in the JFK junior crash. Maintaining stability and control over dynamical systems is a hard problem, which is why many colleges offer entire majors in CDS.

Disclaimer: I am a Space Shuttle enthusiast and a student pilot (hopefully, that will change in two weeks). I know that NASA have the expertise to overcome these problems, and I'm willing to give these engineers the benefit of the doubt. I wish them good weather and no system malfunctions.

Huh. Troll. I know, I'm probably burning karma by replying to this. I don't believe everything I read... but the evidence out there seems to be rather large against a center-fuel-tank-on-fumes explosion. Just look at the burn marks of the bodies (which the coroner repeatedly insisted was caused by fuel burning on the water, rather than from an explosion).

Or you could do your own research from articles published at the time...
http://www.press-enterprise.com/headlines/twa800/h tml/ntsb.html
http://www.press-enterprise.com/headlines/twa800/h tml/front_page.html

Or maybe you'll believe military personell?
Major Frederick C. Meyer was with the New York National Guard's 106th rescue wing at the time of the crash. Meyer and co-pilot Chris Baur were flying an HH-60G helicopter over Gabreski airport in Westhampton Beach practicing landings. Meyer had an excellent viewpoint of the incident and was the first person on the crash scene. Whilst Meyer was keeping a close lookout for a Cessna that was in the area he saw "...A streak of light...moving very rapidly from my left-center farther to my left. It was red-orange in color...And then for an instant I saw nothing - and then suddenly right there I saw an explosion - high velocity explosion...It was military ordnance! A second and a half to two seconds later - farther to the left but down - I saw a flash once again - high velocity explosion." After receiving clearance to investigate further, Meyer flew to the crash area and saw"...A lake of fire, probably 3 acres in size, burning with flames 50 feet high...We worked around the upwind hemisphere of the lake of fire and the first thing we saw were four bodies."

I guess you don't care that it was flying in a military restricted zone, in the middle of military training activities?

Or the fact that more than 80% of the eyewitnesses (around 150) that saw a streak of light moving up from the ground were found to be credible by the FBI.

That rocket fuel found on seats of the plane must have been a fluke.

Nah. It's all conspiracy. It must have been the faulty wiring on the center fuel tank, which sparked (something that was never proven to actually be possible). Occam's razor be damned! Where's my foil! :)

Whoops, make that almost two per day. Preliminary 2002 civil aviation accident statistics

Let's hope that Linux doesn't have the same problem of vertical stabilizers falling off in-flight after only 12 years of use...

How do you explain why the Clinton administration covered up the fact that the plane that was downed in NY during his administration was shot by a rocket-launched missile? There is video evidence showing such a missle coming at the plane from a boat on the river. And the government did nothing - they made the situation 'go away'. The plane was ripped appart, the engines not even near the rest of hte plane. The only way that could have happened is if it were shot. "Air turbulence", as was officially claimed, doesn't hold water.

TWA flight 800?

There was no video of any missile.

There were a few people who said they saw an ascending flaming object that then exploded.

The NTSB Report explains that the evidence (radar and other) clearly shows that the plane climbed sharply after the onboard explosion, while it was certainly already on fire, explaining the ascending streak of light reports without any missile.

As for ripped apart, it exploded. We know there was an explosion in the fuel tank, everyone agrees that there was an explosion in the fuel tank based on the soot inside the tank and the blown apart tank bulkheads. See the NTSB report and all the critics responses. The NTSB report clearly shows how and why the airplane broke up after that explosion resulting in the debris patterns.

The only remaining question is whether it blew up due to some electrical fault in wiring in or near the tank, or due to a missile or something whackier like a meteor. There was no smoking wire recovered in the debris to prove it was an accident, but there have been a large number of fuel tank explosions in military and civilian transport aircraft due to such wiring faults. This was far from the first one to happen.

There is no actual evidence of a missile. Even psychopathic paranoid lunatics now agree on that.

Can we prove conclusively it wasn't? No. But if planes have blown up tens of times before due to wiring faults, and you don't find any actual physical evidence of a missile, Ockham's razor suggests wiring short.

The National Transportation Safety Board pulled investigators pulled people from the Flight 587 probe to help out on the Columbia investigation. NTSB Field Investigators, unfortunately, are experienced with finding the cause from many sometimes grisly pieces of data.
They also know what to bring, what to do, where to go and what to ask. And of course, they known how to extract data from Flight Data Recorders Interestingly, the NTSB issued recommendations that Require retrofit after January 1, 2005, of all cockpit voice recorders (CVRs) [...] [be] fitted with an independent power source [...] that provides 10 minutes of operation whenever aircraft power to the recorder ceases. Just one of the things the NTSB fights the FAA over :-)

But remember the "Black box" (OEX recorder) on the shuttle is very different from a CVR.

The National Transportation Safety Board pulled investigators pulled people from the Flight 587 probe to help out on the Columbia investigation. NTSB Field Investigators, unfortunately, are experienced with finding the cause from many sometimes grisly pieces of data.
They also know what to bring, what to do, where to go and what to ask. And of course, they known how to extract data from Flight Data Recorders Interestingly, the NTSB issued recommendations that Require retrofit after January 1, 2005, of all cockpit voice recorders (CVRs) [...] [be] fitted with an independent power source [...] that provides 10 minutes of operation whenever aircraft power to the recorder ceases. Just one of the things the NTSB fights the FAA over :-)

But remember the "Black box" (OEX recorder) on the shuttle is very different from a CVR.

The National Transportation Safety Board pulled investigators pulled people from the Flight 587 probe to help out on the Columbia investigation. NTSB Field Investigators, unfortunately, are experienced with finding the cause from many sometimes grisly pieces of data.
They also know what to bring, what to do, where to go and what to ask. And of course, they known how to extract data from Flight Data Recorders Interestingly, the NTSB issued recommendations that Require retrofit after January 1, 2005, of all cockpit voice recorders (CVRs) [...] [be] fitted with an independent power source [...] that provides 10 minutes of operation whenever aircraft power to the recorder ceases. Just one of the things the NTSB fights the FAA over :-)

But remember the "Black box" (OEX recorder) on the shuttle is very different from a CVR.

The National Transportation Safety Board pulled investigators pulled people from the Flight 587 probe to help out on the Columbia investigation. NTSB Field Investigators, unfortunately, are experienced with finding the cause from many sometimes grisly pieces of data.
They also know what to bring, what to do, where to go and what to ask. And of course, they known how to extract data from Flight Data Recorders Interestingly, the NTSB issued recommendations that Require retrofit after January 1, 2005, of all cockpit voice recorders (CVRs) [...] [be] fitted with an independent power source [...] that provides 10 minutes of operation whenever aircraft power to the recorder ceases. Just one of the things the NTSB fights the FAA over :-)

But remember the "Black box" (OEX recorder) on the shuttle is very different from a CVR.

They WERE doing pretty well, until they murdered 88 people with pencil-whipped maintenance records.

There was an unsuccessful deployment earlier this year (July?) that resulted in an A.D. (Airworthiness Directive, read - mandatory maintenance). An unrelated A.D. was also issued this year regarding the trim system on the airplane. Complying with this second A.D. necessitated removal of the left aileron.

The pilot who successfully used his BR chute over Dallas was in fact picking his airplane up from the maintenance shop after having them perform the work for the A.D.s. Apparently somebody hadn't tightened/safety-wired the bolts that hold the aileron to the wing. It separated, causing him to use the chute, which thankfully worked.

The ntsb.gov page that gives the synopses of accidents can be found here. Just click on the link for synopses, and search for sr22's in 2002.

According to the NTSB database, there have been about 5100 heli incidents/accidents since 1/1/1980. 879 had at least one fatality.

So, it's not too bad, but compared to the number of general aircraft fatal/nonfatal incident ratio, it's higher.

Of course, that could be due to the higher incident of runway incursions and planes taxiing into other planes causing minor damage, which is included in these numbers. Those kinds of things don't often happen to helicopters, since, well, they don't taxi. :)

we should run the state, and by extension our society, by the principle of what gives the greatest good to the greatest number

Is removing barriers to commerce a good thing? If so, why is spam "bad," since it is enabling commerce?

For murder, why is it that WTC caused so much panic, whereas traffic accidents, personal handguns, and AIDS cause nary a stir? The number of people who died in WTC was (for the sake of argument) 3,000. The number of people who died of in auto wrecks (41,730 for 2001) caused nary a stir, yet much more "harm."

By your reasoning, we need to forget this 9/11, "we'll never forget," patriotism, and Saddam and concentrate on increasing auto safety...

1. Start (Intern|N)ational Computing Safety Board (as opposed to the U.S.'s National Transportation Safety Board.
2. ???
3. Profit! (either from $BIG_CORP bribes or actually getting the Board to work for its intended purpose, either should work)
4. ???
5. Profit! (from lack of $BIG_CORP)

In other words: "This is so cool! I'll use your money to get elected, then I'll put your entire industry in prison to cover my tracks!" --Dogbert

In fact, Lessing was wrong - there is a "law of the horse". One of the earliest legal codes we have, from one of the Scandanavian kings (Ranulf?), has at least two horse-specific laws. And they're interesting.

One law provided that, if a horseshoer made a horse temporarily lame, (which happens occasionally, more often with inept horseshoers) they had to provide a loaner horse until the hoof healed up. This is perhaps the first piece of consumer protection legislation. Note that it's very specific, and, like modern "lemon laws", places the blame unambiguously on the service provider. It's not a general tort or liability law; it's a law that arbitrarily assigns blame for a specific, common problem.

Another law provided that that if someone borrowed a horse and rode it around the village, they were guilty of a minor offense, but if they rode it out of the village, they were guilty of a major offense. Some jurisdictions make that distinction today in auto theft cases, mostly for juveniles.

So the law of the horse did exist when horses were important.

There's a sizable law of steam. Start with the ASME Boiler Code, which is very specific and has the force of law in many countries. Boilers used to blow up frequently before there was law that set standards for boilers and the people who design and build them. The U.S. safety regulations for steam locomotives (49 CFR 230) are still valid and enforced. There's a National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors.

For a history of the law of steam, see page 35 of this recent boiler explosion investigation report. There's a law of steam for good reason. The first law of steam was enacted in the US in 1838, after a riverboat blew up, killing 300 people. The issue remains; a steam locomotive blew up in 1995, killing several people.

Thus, claims that there is no "law of the horse" or "law of steam" are false. Such laws exist.

A bullet piercing a fuel tank wouldn't bring down the plane. The tanks are filled with jet fuel, not gasoline. Jet fuel is more like kerosene -- burns well if vaporized, but does not explode as easily as it appears to in movies. Bullet hole in fuel tank == slow fuel leak.

Also, bullet hole in aircraft hull == slow air leak, not sudden decompression.

Sounds like the dire predictions of "blood in the streets" in various states before the passage of concealed carry laws. Needless to say, the predicted shootouts and insane violence did not come to pass in any of those places.

Based on observed history over the last several decades, people who have permits to carry concealed weapons are just about the safest people to travel with.

If we were to allow concealed-carry permit holders to travel with their weapons, the terrorists will have no way of knowing who's armed on a given flight.

Not really so wacky.

• Suicide - 11th leading cause of death (28,332 cases)
• Murder - 15th leading cause of death (16,137 cases)

• Car accident fatalities in 2000: 41,821 (source quotes FHA stats.)
• Airplane accident fatalities in 2000: 97 (NTSB source

• 1960 - 160.9 per 100,000 (288,460 cases)
• 2000 - 506.1 per 100,000 (1,424,289 cases)

-sk

Here are real stats.

In summary, accidents -- fatal and non-fatal -- are on the decline in the airline industry. There were six accidents for every 100,000 hours of flight time... and that includes all those piddling little one- and two-seater private craft.

Take a look at real aircraft, those that operate on schedule and carry more than a handful of people, and the rates are very impressive: 0.4 accidents for every 100,000 departures. (It is a little unnerving that the rates are on the increase, though!)

Finally, at the bottom of the last table, we see that there were only five suicide/bomb crashes during the eighteen years between 1982 and 2000. There were 147,577,440 departures. That's an attack rate of sweet fuck-all (0.00000339% for those that really need the number).

In short, there appears to be no real good excuse for spending a pile of money on increased security measures. The risk-cost factor just doesn't justify it. Yes, there should be better security measures; but, no, they shouldn't be costly.

IMO, YMMV, IDFM (I don't fly much).

Here are real stats.

In summary, accidents -- fatal and non-fatal -- are on the decline in the airline industry. There were six accidents for every 100,000 hours of flight time... and that includes all those piddling little one- and two-seater private craft.

Take a look at real aircraft, those that operate on schedule and carry more than a handful of people, and the rates are very impressive: 0.4 accidents for every 100,000 departures. (It is a little unnerving that the rates are on the increase, though!)

Finally, at the bottom of the last table, we see that there were only five suicide/bomb crashes during the eighteen years between 1982 and 2000. There were 147,577,440 departures. That's an attack rate of sweet fuck-all (0.00000339% for those that really need the number).

In short, there appears to be no real good excuse for spending a pile of money on increased security measures. The risk-cost factor just doesn't justify it. Yes, there should be better security measures; but, no, they shouldn't be costly.

IMO, YMMV, IDFM (I don't fly much).

One of the reasons why I gave up flying and sold my plane was because of so many pilots who simply did not know how to look out the window. Or how to properly enter the airport traffic pattern. So many morons in the air, and let me tell you from both a pilot perspective and an air traffic control perspective (yes, I've done both), too many pilots depend on their computer gadgets to get from point A to point B.

Here's some perspective: Check out the NTSB aircraft accident site. Follow the links for monthly synopses. If you read enough of the accident reports (I've read many of them), you'll discover navigation is the least of the problems facing pilots today. Most pilots die for one of two reasons: They run out of fuel, or they fly into weather they aren't equipped or trained to handle.

NASA has been at the forefront of the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), and for that I commend them. But you're sadly mistaken, Timmy, if you believe we'll see general aviation become as simple and safe as "driving your car," as you put it. There are way too many other obstacles GA pilots face than how to get from Madison to Detroit. You do your readers a disservice by pretending navigation is the biggest problem us pilots face in the world.

I don't know about you, Timmy, but I think I'd much rather have a parachute recovery system for my small plane than a new nav system: The parachute will be far more useful to me when I'm involved in a midair collision with a pilot who's busy starting at his new cockpit computer rather than looking out the cockpit window.

I am an aerospace engineer, and I fly on A300s once a week. I also used to be involved in air safety and preventive maintainance for a military aviation.

Notes:
1. Single engine failure during take-off is the single worst design condition for a twin-jet like an A-300.
2. Single engine failures during take-off are always taken into account for any passenger aircraft. A simple engine
failure cannot bring down a jetliner.
3. What can bring down a jetliner is the consequences of an engine failure: fire in the wing, explosion of the wing fuel tanks, compound failure of all redundant hydraulic systems, pylon failure (which would expose fuel lines), etc.

However, most of the above reasons are well-known. Take-off is the hardest flight region, and most eventualities are taken into account into designing these birds.

Further, a quick search of NTSB's online air crash info database, reveals no incident involving an A-300 and engine failure in the last 5 yrs. This is not typical if a design error is to be blamed.

Thus, it can be two things: either a failure of preventive maintainance or sabotage. The former is possible, due to the recent massive layoffs in the airline business, but unlikely: airlines usually don't fire skilled personnel, and when/if they do, maintainance personnel tend to over-perform during times of crises.

Please stop assuming that somehow corners are cut when designing airliners or that aero engineers sit around saying "lets use combustive materials for this one, shall we"? We know that we only get one chance to avoid fatalities. Airliners are routinely designed with huge safety margins, usually on top of the worst-ever-recorded conditions.

I can't recall the flight number off the top of my head, but I remember reading an NTSB report of a crash near Anchorage where one of the engines literally fell off the wing.

Either way it's terrible, but I have to concur with the people who are saying this is a "real" crash.

Personally I'd rather believe an aeronautical/aerospace engineer than a physicist (but then im biased ;) ), no offence to physicists but i hardly think that many would have expertise in that area unless it was their special area of research. Similarly i wouldnt think a doctor would have much of a clue about what happens to an aircraft structurally in a depressurisation situation. A doctor would however if they specialised in the area be able to tell you what effects the depressurisation would have on the human body.
For some accident reports on explosive decompressions and their effects on the aircraft you should take a look at some of the following sites or browse around the NTSB (US), AAIB(UK) and BASI (Australia) sites. Some links of direct interest as they cover explosive decompressions include:

Air accident investigation board (UK)

NTSB - Inspired improvements in transportation safety - PDF file(do a search for decompression to find relevant bits)

As for the medical side there is an excellent article on avweb on the effects of hypoxia. As you can see from this article consciousness can be lost in anywhere from minutes to seconds depending on altitude and how quickly the decompression occurs.

Personally I'd rather believe an aeronautical/aerospace engineer than a physicist (but then im biased ;) ), no offence to physicists but i hardly think that many would have expertise in that area unless it was their special area of research. Similarly i wouldnt think a doctor would have much of a clue about what happens to an aircraft structurally in a depressurisation situation. A doctor would however if they specialised in the area be able to tell you what effects the depressurisation would have on the human body.
For some accident reports on explosive decompressions and their effects on the aircraft you should take a look at some of the following sites or browse around the NTSB (US), AAIB(UK) and BASI (Australia) sites. Some links of direct interest as they cover explosive decompressions include:

Air accident investigation board (UK)

NTSB - Inspired improvements in transportation safety - PDF file(do a search for decompression to find relevant bits)

As for the medical side there is an excellent article on avweb on the effects of hypoxia. As you can see from this article consciousness can be lost in anywhere from minutes to seconds depending on altitude and how quickly the decompression occurs.

I dug into airliner black boxes last year after the Concorde disaster and I found some interesting stuff:

• called FDR - flight data recorders
• they're not black - orange or red.. easier to find in the debris.
• withstand an impact of 270 kts (3,400 G decceleration) - from the videos, those airliners were doing 350-400+ knots easy (but Im only an armchair pilot - what do I know)
• withstand 1,100 deg. C fire for up to 60 min. Much analysis was done on the structural failure of the WTC - 1,500+ deg. fires caused that steel to buckle. Does not bode well for the FDRs.

  That, and now they lay under tons of rubble. Or, they could have been vapourized. Then again, I don't think I really want to know about the last terrified moments of those poor souls (unless the terrorists were discussing bin Laden's address and phone number before they died)

  Here's a bit about these amazing little boxes: Whups... some of these appear to be stale - but you could probably still google them.

  • Black boxes: Key to investigations - BBC (good history)
  • Honeywell//Allied Signal Aerospace CVR, FDR - manufacturers of black boxes.
  • Black Boxes, Flight Data Recorders and Cockpit Voice Recorders - Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
  • Penny + Giles Aerospace - Data recorders makers of fine black boxes (good history and technical info).
  • Smiths Industries Flight Data/Cockpit Voice Recorders A report on black box tech. to the International Symposium on Transportation Recorders from a company that makes them for the US armed forces (cool.)
  • not just for planes: crashing race cars