Slashdot Mirror

It's funny how they point to aviation as nearly infallible when they talk about self-driving cars.

Well, it's a little less than one failure in four million flight hours, that's a pretty amazing safety record. If Tesla self-driving was one failure in four million driving hours, I'd call that very near infallible, compared to human drivers, anyway.

But when they do fail, it's spectacular, and makes news.

Source: http://planecrashinfo.com/caus...

Worst case scenario is everyone dies, which isn't much different than a plane crash.

Evidently you aren't aware that 95.7% of surviving an accident in a plane. The vast majority of people actually do survive. When the National Transportation Safety Board studied accidents between 1983 and 2000 involving 53,487 passengers, they found that 51,207 survived.

It's unclear what the statistics might be for hyperloop but assuming instant fiery death is probably not going to be correct for the majority of failure modes.

How about this amataur statistic to compared to yours? If you want to talk about hyperloop which has not even been implemented yet, you should compare it with early implemented commercial airplane statistic instead of modern time (1983~2000). Even though the link I give is outdated already (it didn't collect newer data except the Malaysian one), it should give some ideas about early development of airplane safety...

...and 60% of crashes are due to pilot error: http://www.planecrashinfo.com/...

Granted, that statistic does not say how many crashes were avoided by pilot excellence...

So, yes, the AIs will let some crashes happen a good pilot would prevent, but the AIs will also prevent many crashes a typical pilot might cause through being sleepy, stressed, forgetful, or whatever.

For learning, *much* better simulators (more detailed, including sensor failure) are part of the answer.

That said, as manufactured products and energy get cheaper through automation and improved materials and better designs, maybe more people will be flying for fun soon?

[Citation still needed]

Oh! Here's one.
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/...

Number of crashes is at the lowest it has ever been and fatalities is still half the amount it was in the 70's even though we now have much more people in the air at one time.

as more and more planes fall out of the sky

Wrong.

they will continue to always scapegoat the pilot / train operator / whatever

Who is "they"? Anyway the investigation that took a year was performed by rather independent parties. Plus, Airbus interest is to put the blame on the airline / pilots (Air Asia), Air Asia interest is to blame the aircraft (Airbus)... So after a year when all of those people having conflicting interests come up with an agreed outcome, it's likely to be not far from the truth.

Pilots (for autopilot equipped planes) need licenses because it makes sense to have redundancy when the lives of so many people are on the line and the plane can't park on the curb when it doesn't understand what happens.
Another reason is because of fear. Planes don't crash at all (with reasonable rounding) and most crashes that do happen happen because of pilot error (source not because of mechanical failure (that includes autopilot error). It's not really rational.
An autonomous car drives at most a few passengers and can park when it doesn't understand what's happening. Safe failure modes rule.

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/...

Commercial aircraft go down anything up to 20 times a year, even in modern times. Back when you were a kid, likely 30 times a year or more.

Already we have this lot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

That's one every two weeks. One of the ones you hint at was, what, July and over an entirely different continent anyway.

Learn some statistics. You soon find that people have selection-bias on what they see in the news, what they perceive as a "close fact" (being a plane heading TO Malaysia crashing in another continent, instead of one heading from Malaysia that crashes near Malaysia... very different things), and what they want to lump together to form some kind of extraordinary circumstance.

but is not exactly the same thing as smoking two sets of eyes and leaving the plane permanently pilotless.

I am a private pilot, and you should be aware that without the threat of lasers shining on your windscreen, 56% of fatal aircraft accidents happen during the takeoff, initial climb, final approach and landing phases of flight (where it's possible to shine one of these lasers). This represents approximately 6% of the total time of an average flight. Let me repeat: 56% of fatal accidents happen during the same 6% of a flight.

Given that these are already the most stressful parts of the flight for the pilot, adding stress like not being able to see is insanely bad news. If this had happened at night, it could have temporarily blinded the pilot, long enough to lose control of the plane on the initial climb and stall it out. If it had happened on the final approach or landing, especially on a windy day, the pilot would have missed the runway and likely cratered.

Picking nits about whether the pilot was permanently blinded or not won't matter so much once everyone aboard (and likely some on the ground) are dead because of the incident.

Reference: http://planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

Your concerns are real, but it's no nit that in spite of thousands of incidences investigated by the FAA, not a single one has been attributed to laser pointers.

Let me repeat: Not a single has been attributed to laser pointers.

Given that not a single incident has been known to have been caused by a laser pointer, does it make sense to be handing out long jail sentences to idiots just for being idiots? We don't see long jail sentences for people pulled over for yakking on their cell phones, yet those have caused more accidents than we can count.

but is not exactly the same thing as smoking two sets of eyes and leaving the plane permanently pilotless.

I am a private pilot, and you should be aware that without the threat of lasers shining on your windscreen, 56% of fatal aircraft accidents happen during the takeoff, initial climb, final approach and landing phases of flight (where it's possible to shine one of these lasers). This represents approximately 6% of the total time of an average flight. Let me repeat: 56% of fatal accidents happen during the same 6% of a flight.

Given that these are already the most stressful parts of the flight for the pilot, adding stress like not being able to see is insanely bad news. If this had happened at night, it could have temporarily blinded the pilot, long enough to lose control of the plane on the initial climb and stall it out. If it had happened on the final approach or landing, especially on a windy day, the pilot would have missed the runway and likely cratered.

Picking nits about whether the pilot was permanently blinded or not won't matter so much once everyone aboard (and likely some on the ground) are dead because of the incident.

Reference: http://planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

Out of the nearly 12 million flights per year, there was a problem in 10. So when is less than 1 in a million "pretty darn common"?

It's not so much airplane incidents being common as the perceived severity of potential outcome of an incident. Granted, there have been no nasty incidents reported, but the perception is important among flight crews as well as passengers.

The fatal accident rate in the ten years 2002-2011 for airlines in North America was well below 1 in 20 million (actually only 2 airlines had such crashes, and even for them it was rather less than 1 in a million flights). Similar statistics apply to Europe and indeed to airlines across most of the world. Only outliers such as Aeroflot, Air India, China Airlines, Iran Air, Kenya Airlines, PIA, and TACA have rates above 1 in a million, and even for them it's not above 3 in a million flights.

Airline flight and cabin crews are perhaps even keener than passengers to prevent any increase in these rates, and to avoid any risk of increase. Everything which is not proven safe, is considered unsafe, in their view.

It has already been done. There was the EgyptAir Flight 990.. EgyptAir Flight 990..
From the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder.

0150:05.89 I rely on God.

0150:06.37 what's happening? what's happening?

0150:07.07 I rely on God.

0150:07.11 [sound of numerous thumps and clinks continue for approximately fifteen seconds]

0150:08.20 [repeating hi-low tone similar to Master Warning aural start and continues to the end of recording]

0150:08.48 I rely on God.

0150:08.53 what's happening?

0150:15.15 what's happening, Gamil? what's happening?

Ultimately you have to be able to trust the people on the flight deck. That didn't do the people on Air France Flight 447. Considering that NTSB investigations put most of the blame on pilot error, they ultimately have the responsibility for your safety. What sense does it make to run them through a nudeo-scan 5000 or a metal detector at all? there's also hundreds of employees at every major airport who have access to the aircraft and maintenance systems. At some point you have to trust them with your safety as well. I'd trade a metal detector for a breathalyzer test for them though.

The problem with the TSA, and as has been pointed out many times, is that they're are looking for the last thing that terrorists tried. Underwear bombers necessitate nudeo-scans. Richard Reid had a little explosive in his shoes, so now they have to be x-rayed. Somebody thought that somebody was trying to mix liquids so now no baby formula through the scanners.

I fly, 2 to 4 times a week and I'll tell you what the biggest problem with airline security is: It's the people of the TSA, the lack of consistency and the don't care attitude. Yes, they would like to be doing something else, perhaps flipping burgers or selling insurance but they wound up with a blue uniform checking 1000s of passengers a day who don't like the whole process. They also don't pay attention as well. Here's a true story, I go to the self service machine to check in, get my boarding pass. I go through the line and proceed to my gate. When boarding the plane the gate scanner doesn't "beep" to indicate that I'm okay to board. Why? I have somebody else's boarding pass with their name on it. The guy at the TSA line who looked at it and my ID and me, didn't say a word. Wow, talk about making me feel safe?

Here's what has to happen, get viscous dogs, guys in cammos and start walking the lines. If the next terrorist is in that line you can bet he'd start sweating and then spot, not the TSA SPOT, can do the rest.

would you trust WiFi to drive your car?

Do I trust the drivers of the other cars?

Cars are these strange things that drive our minds crazy. I don't know how much is cultural (i.e. movies, etc.) and how much is psychological, but there are few areas in life where the disconnect between reality and subjective is so dramatic.

Everyone thinks he's an above-average driver. Of course, that's statistically impossible.
Almost everyone overestimates his (or her) ability to handle a car in unusual circumstances.
Very few people can correctly judge road and weather conditions and their impacts on things like brake distance.
Most people do not have a correct sense of speed anymore if they've driven at speed for a few hours.

and so on and so forth. Car accidents are within the top reasons of unnatural death in most western countries, but most of us feel more uneasy going on a rollercoaster (which cause what, a dozen or so deaths a year, world-wide?) or on a plane (around 1000 deaths per year, world-wide) than taking the car to work (1,200,000 deaths per year, world-wide). Yes, that's the real numbers, here and here are some sources, or google your own. Plane crashes fall way below the rounding error margin of car crashes.

Really, you would have to put really bad engineers with pre-historic computer equipment and unstable wiring into those cars to make them worse than human drivers.

Actually that number is wrong. The odds are much much higher.

The odds of dying in a terrorist attack on a plane in a given year are 1 in 25,000,000.
The odds of a Westerner being killed by a terrorist in a given year are 1 in 3,000,000.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html

The odds of your dying in a 1 hour flight in a given year are less than 1 in 1,000,000.
http://planecrashinfo.com/

The odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html

The odds of dying in a car accident within one year 1 in 18,585.
The odds of simply being in a car accident within one year are 1 in 5,889.
The odds of dying by an assault within one year are 1 in 16,421.
http://www.nsc.org/

I think, if I am not mistaken, I have a better chance to win a state lottery than die in an terrorist attack on an airplane. I am so much more likely to die from an assault than a terrorist, it is an order of magnitude that is just plain silly. So as you can see the odds are pretty slim to die by a terrorist attack of any kind. I think I can risk it, and have far less security at airport with no groping or radiation. If I get a choice, I choose my Constitutional freedoms, over being safe. If a terrorist kills me so be it. At least I died with all my freedoms, rather than beaten down by my own government.

The highest death toll of any airplane crash in history that didn't include the pilot flying into something was Flight 123 on Japan Air Lines. it had a death toll of 520. Barely a blip on the public's radar.

You would have to surpass the death toll of of the worst non-pilot caused plane crash 5 times to get anywhere near the trade tower death toll.

So, the question comes back to you. What about underwear bombers?

You can't live a life without risk. Nor is the avoidance of risk worth any price (otherwise we'd drive a tank at 5km/hr while wearing a helmet and a flak jacket to go to the corner store for milk.) (And then not drink the milk for fear it was contaminated.) Ask all those people stuck in the wrong part of the world whether they'd take a flight if the chance of dying was 1 in 100,000 rather than the normal 1 in 9,000,000. I think you'd find most of them would accept it as a worthwhile risk.

Also, not flying is not a no-risk option. Pharmaceuticals are almost always shipped by air. Soon people will start dying as drug stockpiles run out.

"Have we erred too far on the side of caution" is NOT a "stupid f***ing question".

However, I believe that crash actually helps make your point. Let's expand the time line from your article to the present. We now have about 130,000 people dead in the USA from car crashes and 50 from airline crashes. There were some smaller crashes (the global list of all crashes is here http://www.planecrashinfo.com/ but it doesn't change the point. The ratio is truly stunning.

- more importantly, none of the airplane deaths in the US in the past 9 years had anything to do with airplanes.

A couple of failed attempts happened, but were stopped by passengers and crew members, no thanks to TSA.

In the last two years over 80,000 people died on US highways, but there wasn't even one death from flying in a commercial airliner.

You're more likely to die from falling down your basement stairs, and far more likely to die at the hands of your own family than a terrorist.

You linked to an old article. In the last two years, we had this crash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407

    However, I believe that crash actually helps make your point. Let's expand the time line from your article to the present. We now have about 130,000 people dead in the USA from car crashes and 50 from airline crashes. There were some smaller crashes (the global list of all crashes is here http://www.planecrashinfo.com/ but it doesn't change the point. The ratio is truly stunning.

Out of 129 flights 2 have gone wrong or a .003 percent failure rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions#List_of_shuttle_flights

Of course when things go wrong for them it goes amazingly spectacularly. You cannt have that much LOX laying around and other major crazy flammable stuff and not have someone die once and awhile.

2 divided by 129 is 1.55%. It's not a good failure rate, especially considering the failure and accident rate of commercial airlines. Here are some plane crash statistics. Plane Crash Info.

NASA was negligent in both of those crashes. Their QA has an abysmal track record compared to other Level 1 systems such an US Naval nuclear power or commercial air.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_(film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(TV_miniseries) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13_movie While dramatized it shows why they do it.

These dudes are *IN* it because it is risky. They love the risk.... Just because you are risk adverse (it shows because you want a 0% fail rate) doesnt mean they are. These dudes are crazy...

Astronaut movies have about as much to do with space travel as The Hunt For Red October does with being a submariner or Tron does with being an IT worker.

"Company travel is now restricted to the A330 until a solution is found."

I know this is a joke but Airbus make the designers of the plane take the first test flight, this tends to inspire more attention to detail in the aircraft's design.

The problem with flight AF447 is not the fact that the plane was an Airbus A330 but the fact the plane was flying through a violent thunderstorm. Prior to AF447 the Airbus A330 had 1 fatal crash with 7 fatalities, this was a test flight before the aircraft was available for commercial sale. Considering the number of A330's in service it's one of the safest planes around.

Besides this, mechanical failure is responsible for about 20% of all crashes, the vast majority of crashes are attributed to pilot error, 51% according to Wikipedia, 45% according to the second result on a google search. Because of this I look at the saftey record of the airline (who controls the quality of the pilots they employ) rather then the safety of the aircraft. Europe's aviation safety organisation is far more strict then the US's, if the A330 was unsafe in any way it would not be permitted to fly.

However, many NTSB reports conclude with "pilot error" as the cause of accidents.

That's too vague to be useful...

Looking at the chart, from 2000-2008, the number of "mechanical failure" crashes exceeds those of simple "pilot error". In other decades, the distribution has been similarly very close.

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

This was a controversial move, but until now has worked well for Airbus.

I wouldn't quite say that. Airbus is pretty notorious for issues like 10lbs of force being the minimum needed to affect the rudder, while 20lbs of force will deflect the rudder too much and seriously risk causing the tail to break-off.

Contrary to your implications, the Airbus computer doesn't do ANYTHING to detect and/or correct this situation, or most other failure scenarios.

...54% of the fatal accidents (total pilot error + other human error, 2000s), then logically I would say, yes I would rather trust the autopilot in an emergency situation.

Quite correct, of the statistics from http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm are anything to go by. They list 'pilot error', at 50%, as the biggest single cause. That's followed by 'Mechanical failure' at 22%.

What IS interesting from their statistics is that your choice of airline DOES effect your odds of being killed on a single airline flight:

Top 25 airlines with the best records: 1 in 13.57 million
Bottom 25 with the worst records: 1 in 1.13 million

So from that you could reason that they neglect not only the planes (poor maintence, overwork) but also their pilots (overwork, poor training)*.

Flying with the top 25% you're TEN (yes, 10) times less likely to die than flying the botton 25%....

* I'd hazard an guess that a large proportion of the top 25 % are airlines which only do internal or short-haul flights, whilst the bottom specilize in flying very long distances.

More crashes occur on the ground than in the air. In fact, according to http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm 62% of crashes occur on the ground, they're just usually the least fatal.

There's not a lot of risk in straight and level flight...

Qantas is one of the safest airlines in the world.

That's quite a loaded statement.

Worldwide, 8 of the top 10 are in North America. Delta and Southwest being virtually tied for the #1 spot, both a large margin ahead of any others.

Lufthansa (#4) and British Airways (#7) rounding out the top 10.

Quantas ranks just 17th. Since there are likely more than 100 airlines, I suppose you could call them "one of the safest" in some vague way. Top 20 (out of ~100) isn't exactly great, though.

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm

Exactly. Small planes are unregulated and hence much, much more unsafe. The crash record for small planes is staggeringly higher than the commercial industry.

Commercial plane crash stats:
http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/safety

This makes general aviation, with 16 deaths per 1 million hours, roughly 20 times as dangerous per hour than driving. .... Big airliners have a fatal crash rate of 0.34 per million flight hours, approximately 50 times safer than general aviation. Try to avoid that final commuter hop, though. Those smaller turboprops crash 10 times as frequently per hour of operation, making them only 5 times as safe as general aviation.

So, commercial flights are safer than driving. Private planes are definitely NOT - but many times depends on pilot.

Finally, private cesna flying is slower than driving because you can't fly in many conditions.

Trust me, if you were to be injured or killed during a flight--extremely unlikely as it is, you probably stand a greater chance of it being because some nutjob jihadist checked a bomb, or infiltrated airport security and poisoned the in-flight food, than because of mechanical failure or runway incursions or mid-air collisions or birds meeting their maker inside a jet engine.

What was the Russian proverb again? Trust, but verify? Check the statistics, accidents are still way more common than deaths due to terrorism on airplanes.
Are the US Govt scare tactics this effective?

With a plane crash, my chance of survival is hovering somewhere around 0%.

Not true. The survival rate in fatal crashes (in which at least 1 person dies) is around 35% (Orange chart, ~1/3 down the page). That includes crashes where everyone dies, but does not includes crashes where nobody dies, so it's "worst case," if you will. Moreover, your risk of dying in a plane crash is *gasp* proportional to the frequency of flights you take. Of course 0 flights = 0 risk, planes falling on you aside, but several flights over a lifetime introduces much less risk than simply walking up and down stairs.

Additionally, the illusion of total control in a vehicle is just that. There are many circumstances, beyond your control, which can cause you to lose control. You mention not driving in inclimate weather in your reply below, but you can't control the weather, and if you're already on the highway there's nothing you can do. I was in a near fatal crash when my tires lost traction on a wet road after it had started sprinkling. If my car had hit the phone pole head on or sideways, I'd probably be dead or disabled. (And yes, it was a late model car with TCS). Fortunately it did a 180 and hit backwards, which I may or may not have helped intentionally. I honestly can't remember the 5-10 seconds or so before impact when I blacked out. Additionally, there's the person behind and next to you, and, on freeways without dividers (and in some cases, even with dividers) there's the person coming in the opposite direction. There's mechanical failures, there's dumbasses throwing shit from overpasses (and dumbass is a considerable understatement), there's maniacs shooting at other drivers, there's crazy people driving tanks, there's road debris, truck tires going through windshields, falling cargo, driver fatigue (if you tell me you've never driven fatigued, then you've never had a long or hard day at work or taken a road trip), blind spots, excessive speeders (the lane may have been clear when you started to merge..), there's collapsing bridges, collapsing tunnels, potholes, sink holes, open/broken manholes, shifting steel plates, earthquakes, landslides, standing water, black ice, oil slicks, cars with headlights off, cars with high beams on, truck headlights in the mirrors, burned out stoplights, knocked-over stop signs, car jackers, suicide jumpers, falling construction, falling trees and poles, falling power lines, lightning strikes, alien abductions, and, of course, planes falling out of the sky.

We didn't start the fire...

Congratulations! Way to show your arrogance...

I suggest you look at http://www.planecrashinfo.com/rates.htm - note that the extreme limits of the distribution are 0 - 7 and the vast majority are either 0 or 1.

One or two accidents would make a huge difference to the rating of most of these airlines, certainly it would knock the leaders out of top spot easily enough.

I'm pretty sure Singapore Airlines has one of the best safety records.

It also has one, if not the best, aviation safety record of any airline, ever.

So, you don't drive then?

According to the NTSB, your odds of dying in a single trip in a car is 7.6 million to 1. Your odds of dying in a single trip in a plane is 52.6 million to 1.

53% of fatal plane crashes (1950-2004) were caused by pilot error. 8% by "sabotage" which includes hijackings.

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

But you'd think about the risk more. And it might be different if it was a motorcycle.

But.. um.. could you describe the mechanism by which you came to the conclusion that it's safer than the airline flight and drive?

'cause it seems to me that if these guys are right about the "per trip" statistics, and you figure drive, flight, drive, your odds of being in a fatal accident on the way to the pad are something like, 3.8 million to one against, whereas the odds of being in a fatal trip to space and back have a historical record of something like 50 to one against.

Not since 1951 at least, I guess this is the movie quote you're referring to ;)

The pilot had made a slow pass over the field, and when he tried to pull the plane up, the computer overrode his commands thinking he was trying to land, and that is why they crashed into the forest.

While there some conspiracy theories, as with many catastrophes, the generally accepted story differs very substantially from the above.

The aircraft was flown at maximum angle of attack (AOA) at about 30-35 ft above the runway during an air show, with passengers on board. The pilot disconnected the autothrottle system, as its "alpha-floor" system would have automatically increased the engine thrust, preventing him from slowing the aircraft as much as he wanted. The aircraft eventually ended up at about 30-35 ft above the runway, with the engines at idle, and at the maximum allowable AOA.

The co-pilot noted that the obstacles ahead were higher than the aircraft, alerted the pilot, who pushed the thrust levers (i.e. throttles) ahead, and pulled back on the controls. The flight control system did not allow the pilot to raise the aircraft's nose, as that would have required increasing the angle of attack, and the wing would have stalled. The only way out of the hole he dug was to get more thrust. The faster you go at a given AOA, the more lift the wing produces. The fact that lift is now greater than the weight means the flight path starts to curve upwards, and the nose rises, even at the same AOA. But, it takes about 7 seconds for a modern high-bypass ratio turbofan engine to accelerate from idle to full thrust (the regulations allow 8 seconds), and they hit the trees 5 seconds after he pushed the thrust levers forward.

The flight control system's AOA limiting function prevented a much more serious accident, as if the wing had stalled the aircraft would have went out of control. As it was, it hit the trees in controlled flight, and only three people died.

After that, an emergency pilot override was placed in AirBus jets.

There is no emergency override in the Airbus jets. The pilot can manually turn off enough flight control computers to put the flight controls in Direct Law, where there are no longer any artificial limits on what he can do, but this would not have prevented this accident. He would have crashed much earlier in the sequence if he had tried to do the same thing in Direct Law.

The Boeing 777 can takeoff and land automatically.

The Boeing 777 cannot takeoff automatically. It can land automatically, as can all the other modern large airliners, including Airbus A320, A330 and A340.

From the statistics on this web site it becomes clear that low-visibility landings account for far less than 80% of the crashes. So other measures are necessary as well if plane crashes are to be reduced by that factor.

It is true that Moffett lies on the boundary; highway 101 is adjacent the golf course and the airfield, and the airstrip is roughly perpendicular to the freeway. In fact, there are runway lights on the golf course property!

Incidentally, I've often passed that golf course and been told that "golf is a deadly sport" -- it was always rumored that some golfers had been killed by a plane crashing into them there. This is the most confirmation I can find, but no ground casualties...

FWIW :)

The real purpose of the system is to prevent crashes into mountains, which are referred to by the euphemism "controlled flight into terrain". Basically, the pilot doesn't realize that a mountain or hill is in the flight path and just slams the plane right into it. This system will go a long way to preventing that type of accident, which is actually one of the more common.

Hm... looks like about 7 of the 30 or so plane crashes (there are 35 recorded, but some are helicopters) in 2003 are from crashing into mountains, according to this database. Seems like the most common cause of accidents is a mechanical failure of some sort, and they tend to happen during take-off or landing. Still, yeah, that is a lot of planes crashing into mountains, though many of those flights were pretty small and would be unlikely to be equipped with this system anyway.

Whatever the real reasons for this system, though, I don't see it as necessarily preventing more fatalities than it could potentially cause. What I'd like to know is, how many near misses with terrain would have triggered this system, and in how many of those cases would the outcome have been better than it was? And, how many times were those near misses the result of mechanical failures which the pilot could compensate for, but the automated guidance system might not have been able to?

To me it is a no-brainer. This sort of technology will save far more lives -- maybe from terrorism, but mostly from simple pilot error -- than it will kill.

This isn't a no-brainer to me. Before I'll get on a plane with this system in place, I want to see a run-down of:

- What percentage of airplane crashes or near-misses in the last two decades would have triggered this system

- What percentage of those cases could we have expected the system to improve the survival prospects of the passengers/crew

My gut feeling is, the overwhelming majority of situations that would have triggered this automatic override were due to mechanical failures that the autopilot was not as well-equipped to handle as the real pilot. I wouldn't be surprised if we found that the number of crashes that this system could theoretically have averted would have been nullified by the increased death toll when this system kicked in and prevented pilots from making safe emergency landings. Think about it... 200 people on a typical plane flight. Cause 15 crashes, and you make up for the entire WTC losses.

Found an interesting site with a database of airplane crashes. Starting from 2003 and scanning back through all those with >100 on board, I got to 1998 before I found a crash that might have been averted by this system. Of course, since it only lists crashes, we don't know about other incidents when this system would have triggered.

Interestingly enough, looking at this database I'm surprised to find that there were fewer than 100 people aboard any of the 9/11 flights. Maybe it would take more than 15 plane crashes to compensate for the 3000 lost in the WTC strike. Still, I'm not sure I'd feel more comfortable with losing a friend or relative to a computer's decision to take control away from a pilot than with losing them to an act of outright anger and destruction.

People, there are other kinds of accidents than terrorism. What pilot in their right mind would want to fly a plane that won't respond to controls? Not many, fortunately:

"He [Don Winter, director of R&D at Boeing's Phantom Works research division in St Louis] has yet to convince the people who fly the planes. "In general, pilots are openly hostile," he says. "Frankly it surprises me, because of all of the options that they are facing right now - including being shot at or commandeered from the ground - this is their best one."" Well, the pilots probably have a firmer grasp on accident statistics than Don Winter and most of the public. Soft walls would obvoiusly increase the risk for just about any kind of accident except hijacking.

I didn't know Vic Morrow was going to be in it!


(Damn kids! If you don't get my cogent comment, google it up! sheesh.)