Air Safety Advisory

 

I've been watching a lot of air crash videos lately, so I thought I'd make one more post on the topic, as air travel begins to heat back up again after the relaxation of travel restrictions. These are likely to be re-imposed, and re-eased, multiple times, so this post should remain relevant.

I've come to the conclusion is that by far the most dangerous commercial aircraft to fly in is one that is of a new design the pilots are not familiar with. This is because today's aircraft are so computerized that as often as not, now it's the computer that crashes the plane when it disregards what it regards as nonsense input from the pilot. A pilot not familiar with how to deal with this is likely to die along with his passengers, despite his best efforts to regain control. Although the recent 737 Max debacle showed, Boeing is not immune to this problem--but it affects Airbus planes more often, and with more deadly results, because Airbus planes are totally fly-by-wire, meaning that all control signals initiated by the pilot have to be approved by the computer before being passed on to the control surfaces.

If there's any comforting thought in all of this, it's that the airline safety business is extremely heuristic: whenever people die in a plane accident, the response is always two pronged: first to determine exactly what happened, and then to take whatever steps are necessary to keep it from happening again. If only the criminal justice business worked that way: it's real good at the former, but horrible at the latter.