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What NASA Won't Tell You About Air Safety
rabble writes "According to a report out of Washington, NASA wants to avoid telling you about how unsafe you are when you fly. According to the article, when an $8.5M safety study of about 24,000 pilots indicated an alarming number of near collisions and runway incidents, NASA refused to release the results. The article quotes one congressman as saying 'There is a faint odor about it all.' A friend of mine who is a general aviation pilot responded to the article by saying 'It's scary but no surprise to those of us who fly.'"
How is this really that bad? Even when the pilots suck, and the traffic controllers are asleep at the helm we still manage to be safer then driving. Seems to me like flying is pretty damn safe, and even better if everyone is paying attention to whats going on.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
The drive to the airport.
Flying is so much safer than driving to the airport it is not even funny.
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Is it really NASA as a whole. Keep in mind that until a year or so ago a single Bush-appointed kid was responsible for censoring all of NASA's press releases about basic science. The kid in question had no college degree, no background in science, and his sole qualification appeared to be having been head of the Texas young republicans at his school. This despite opposition from most of NASA.
Not to sound like some NASA apologist or something but in my experience with large institutions many of the things done "by NASA" or some other group are often the work of one or a few key individuals and many times may run counter to the very goals of the institution and most people involved in it. It wouldn't surprise me if the political appointee that replaced the kid is doing this.
Air travel is like hot dogs. Ignorance is bliss.
Seriously though, I try to remind myself that the pilots are just as interested in getting to the destination in one piece as I am.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
why is NASA doing this? Isn't this the domain of the FAA and NTSB?
"I wish to God these calculations would have been made by steam." -Charles Babbage
No my silly friend.. A near miss is a term of proximity.. A near hit is a practice in redundancy. A near hit would be two things hitting eachother, while near eachother(see how its redundant?) A near miss would be two things *nearly* hitting eachother.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
So what your saying is... They missed each other by 1/2 a mile or more directly over multiple airports that you are 3 miles from? Sounds pretty obvious to me.
Amazing. Once upon a time, the only valid reason for withholding information was if it would affect the nation's security. Now, "commercial welfare" is just as valid as "national security".
How many other documents can now be hidden from public view, given the low bar of "could materially affect the public confidence"? Apparently, if you're not "confident", you're with the terrorists!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Is it a "near miss" when a collision is narrowly avoided? or is it a "near miss" when two planes pass closer than they should to each other, but were really in no real danger of colliding? For example, on the freeway, cars sometimes swerve towards another car, then realize what they are doing, and move back into the center of their lane. Is that a "near accident," or just a normal occurrence? I'm serious about this. I'd really like to know what counts as a "near miss."
Isn't the safety of an activity determined by the number of actual accidents, and not by the number of near-accidents?
:-). However, I often find myself in the situation of almost making an accident.
For example, I've been driving about 14 years without ever causing an accident (or at least, none that I was involved in to know of
Fo example, you start to do a lane change, and suddenly, before you actually enter the other lane, you notice another car there, and abort the lane change. The point of driving experience and skill is it also helps you to cope with the near-accidents that your driving skills failed to prevent.
Surely something similar is relevant to flying too?
NASA cares quite a bit about commercial air travel. Remember that the second 'A' stands for Aeronautics. NASA is quite involved in air traffic control research. The FAA's job is usually more current and practical in nature.
Everywhere I've worked has been populated by slackers, incompetents and other people not doing their job fully. Why is surprising then that as it turns out, the airline industry is the same? Is it any surprise that corners are cut, that communication isn't always good and that faulty assumptions are made? It's this where everywhere. IF you're surprised by this, have you ever left your house and worked?
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Because it is (a) too damned expensive to put in rail lines and (b) the current system is slow enough most people can drive to their destinations faster, for less (gas) money.
If we still had legions of penny-a-day, disposable immigrants and virtually no opposition to laying track through high-value suburbs then we might have the ability to put in light rail. But we don't...on either count...so it will never happen. Rail is phenomenally expensive to put in, and nobody wants it in their back yard. It will never be commercially viable in the US except in dense areas (which, not too surprisingly, is what much of Europe looks like).
Also, high-speed rail has the same annoying problem as high-speed internet - the last mile is very tough to cover. Airports have that problem, too, but rail is going to have to do _better_ to compensate for the inherent slower travel speeds.
Besides - more rail traffic means more chances of collision, and I would guess (though I can't back it up) that there have been more US rail crashes in the last 5 years than US commercial airline crashes (including both passenger and freight).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Growing up we had a saying referring to how close something came to almost happening, but didn't ...
"Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
This has zero relevance to copyright law. They have agreed to collect data on the condition that they only release statistics. Which is what they did. It is legally and ethically fine. Anonymous surveys are an incredibly useful tool, especially when done by people that understand how to do them well, and what the limitations are.
Even this study, which the AP was quick to hit the panic button about, states that your odds of dying on any given airline flight is one in 4.5 million. Your odds of dying in any sort of air travel accident in your liftetime (on average...obviously, odds vary according to how often you fly) are about one in 20,000. You odds of dying in a car are about one in a hundred. Your odds of dying in an airliner hijacked by terrorists are about 1 in 55 million. So, obviously, the government is spending billions to combat terrorism, millions on air safety, and hardly anything on automotive safety.
Does anyone in government ever bother to READ the reports they spend so much time and money writing and classifying?
A collusion is a near miss.
You keep on using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Please do not use doubletalk; words designed to make bad things sound better
Please don't quote someone (George Carlin) without citing them. Thank you.
My personal experience in the past year:
* Taken 16 flights
* Experienced zero accidents or near incidents involving aircraft
* Witnessed zero accidents or near incidents involving aircraft
However:
* Witnessed three auto accidents en-route to airport
* Witnessed one auto accident en-route to home from airport
* Taxi driver taking me home from airport narrowly avoided a severe collision
Flying doesn't scare me in the slightest, but I sometimes find myself nervous when I have to fly. Can you guess from the above experiences why? Safety at the airport in my home town is scrutinised very closely and by all appearances seems to be top notch. On the other hand, the city seems to have no qualms about planning several simultaneous construction projects along a single route, replete with inadequate road markings, constantly changing signal configurations and restricted lanes...which don't mix well at all with drivers who ignore the reduced speed limits and feel that they absolutely must not leave one or more car-length of space between themselves and the vehicle they are following, lest someone has the gall to cut in front of them.
The article of discussion here stated that there is one in-flight fatality per MILLIONS of departures--I bet more people die golfing than flying and certainly driving is several orders of magnitude more risky. Roads are WAY more crowded than runways and airspace, aircraft are in MUCH better condition and far more reliable than automobiles and pilots are FAR more skilled and competent than even some of the better drivers on the road.
It seems to me that even if NASA's interviews suggest incidents are under-reported by half that overall air safety is quite good and certainly not worth the alarmist tones by those involved. If there is ANYTHING about air travel we should be concerned about, beyond the hazardous road trip to the airport (if it isn't the construction-infested road to the airport at home it is the dangerously confusing interchanges and signage at other large airports), it is the screwed up state of security at airports. Recent surveys have shown that security gate personnel have been extremely good at confiscating grandma's knitting needles, threatening toiletries and risky bottles of Evian, but when it comes to REAL security they have been almost criminally neglectful.
For example, in LAX testers placed very obvious-looking bomb components into checked luggage (batteries with wires and circuitry attached, realistic-appearing explosives, etc) and 3 out of 4 times it cleared security. In the recent past air cargo security has been circumvented up to 90 percent of the time. At the airport I take off from regularly a mentally disturbed person scaled the perimiter fence, wandered onto the runways and tried to flag down a commercial jumbo jet preparing for takeoff. In Montreal a reporter crawled under a similar fence, got into an unlocked maintenance truck and started it up. Then he put on a smock and waled right into the CARA kitchen preparing food for the next departing flight posing as an inspector. Nobody questioned his presence, asked for ID or anything.
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 happens if I drive a big-ass car rather than a tiny-ass POS, so if I hit your tiny-ass POS I live and you die?
Right, so the solution to make roads safer is that we need to make sure everyone has a bigger than average car, right? Also, no matter how big your car is, if you strike a large enough concrete object or tree, you still die. Is your car also safe against people who run over red lights and hit you on the side?
Second, the "safety" of airlines is always touted by considering total miles traveled, not TIME IN THE VEHICLE
When you want to go from point A to point B, and you consider whether to do it by car of by plane, it's the *distance* that's constant, not the time.
Let's turn the tables, shall we? OK, airlines, if you're going to include teenage hotrod and dead-drunk idiots in your road statistics, I'm gonna include all the private airplanes that are busy dropping out of the sky on a daily basis. Who wins now?
Airplanes still win -- by a large amount.
About statistics, they should include everything, both for planes and for cars. "But what about the statistics of people who live on my street have my name and drive the same car as I do?" This is not statistics, this is anecdote.
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but most car accidents don't kill a hundred people.
I do not get all this. If we were talking about something with a small sample of events (like flying to space) we could say something like "we are not having as many accidents as the current conditions should lead to, so we are just being lucky" and make a fuss about having to change something. But there are about a hundred thousand flights EACH DAY, so the rate of accidents we see must be, to a minuscule margin of error, what the current conditions warrant. So saying "we are having too many close calls" is silly if we are not having more accidents than what we are willing to accept. The number of close calls is irrelevant when we have a well measured number of accidents to measure risk. And while the ideal accident rate is zero, I'm not willing to pay even 10% more for my tickets to reduce my chances of dying in a plane crash by one thousandth of a percent point (approximately the current chances). And I've lost one friend to a plane crash, so I know it CAN happen. But the chances are so small that it is clearly an acceptable risk. Of course, we need to do what's possible to reduce exceptiosn due to negligence (most accidents are caused by that) but talking about revamping the system or implementing expensive changes based on this is just plain stupid.
The one that gets me is that I've never actually seen a report involving two planes hitting each other. I've heard of planes going down from hitting mountains, buildings, because of hardware issues, because of bombs, or because the pilot was too drunk to see the ground. But I've never once turned on the news and heard about two planes hitting each other. So while I'm sure it must happen occasionally, focusing on things like that would not make nearly as much sense as focusing on other points of failure. (Like snakes in the cargo hold).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Hmmm my car seems to be missing the altimiter and compass and "flying mode" options...
Hehe. I guess that part didn't come out very well. The point being, just like in a car, you follow your lane. For planes, the lane is imaginary but enforced by regulation and/or ATC. By procedure, pilots stay in their lanes. Depending on the type of flying, regulations even specify the width of the lane.