I've
seen some stupid headlines in my day. But this one from The Daily Beast takes the cake:
"A Plane Crash That Should Never Have Happened."
Oh, wow, really? Really?
Shouldn't all plane crashes "never have happened?" Or are there some that
should have? Or some that were totally unavoidable.
It's
dumb. It's so dumb that it literally makes me shake my head in wonder.
The Daily Beast story refers to the accident in October of 2018 of a new model of Boeing's legendary 737 called the "Max-8." The plane was operated by an outfit called Lion Air. It crashed after takeoff from Jakarta, Indonesia.
The focus of the accident investigation now appears to center on a stability-augmentation device that Boeing discretely added to the flight control system to help with some aerodynamic, err, "issues" discovered during the new model's pre-certification flight-testing. And that stability-augmentation system malfunctioned in some way. Apparently there is some talk now that if the Lion Air pilots knew of this new system and how to handle its various failure modes, then the crash would not have happened.
Maybe. Nothing is certain.
Well...one thing is certain. Look,
people. NOTHING is perfect. Certainly not air travel. Not airplanes nor the
pilots that fly them. We all must face this irrefutable fact: If you go
up in an airplane you might die. Chances are you won't, but you might.
It may
come as some surprise, but airplanes fly "up there" in the sky, where
the environment is subject to the whim of Mother Nature...where there are
storms and lightning and wind and turbulence...sometimes all at once and
sometimes in extremes.
There
is no guarantee that every flight will be smooth as silk. You might die. Wrap
your head around that next time you book your ticket. Don't want to deal with that kind of risk? Great. Drive. You don't care about those risks? Good. Now
stow your gear in the overhead bin, sit down and keep quiet. And don't complain
next time some captain makes three attempts to land before going somewhere
else. And don't complain to me when you hit "unforecast" turbulence
in flight and you get hurt because you didn't have your seatbelt on.
Read the Daily Beast story HERE
6 comments:
There are always risks. I don't have any statistics in front of me upon which to base this statement, but isn't is safer to fly than to drive?
What does that even mean? I've never understood that phrase. Aviation proponents like to say that flying is "safer" than driving - for millions of miles traveled or whatever. Nonsense. How would one even make that comparison in a realistic, meaningful way? I drive every day of my life, just about. But I only rarely fly on the airlines. What if I were to board a 737 Max-8 flown by two drunk pilots into an area of known thunderstorms? I don't even want to think of those odds.
As you say Kelly, everything has risk associated with it. What ticks me off is when an airliner has some sort of non-fatal, non-crash "event" that scares the bejaysus out of the passengers, who immediately alert the media and post on Instagram about their "near-death" experience. Such things are all over the news lately.
Recently, a Southwest Airlines flight encountered some strong turbulence as it was landing in Connecticut. The pilot made three brave attempts before diverting to Rhode Island. Many passengers got sick from the rough air. "We thought we were going to die!!" they breathlessly exclaimed afterward, as if even the though of such a possibility was the farthest thing from anyone's mind. And I'm, like, "Yeah, and you know what? You should have been thinking that before you took off!"
Planes are not on rails. Mechanical things go wrong. They are still flown by humans...fallible humans who must react instantaneously to a gajillion variables while conducting the plane through to the destination. And sometimes they don't make all the perfect decisions.
Whichever mode of transportation is "safer" is really moot; when you're number is up it's up. I can control more things when I'm behind the wheel of my own car than I can when I'm sitting in the back of an aluminum tube flown by lesser pilots than myself.
Risk management is how I make my living. Some believe I’m
supposed to eliminate it. Nope. I manage it. I advise about it. I have all kinds of tools to help mitigate it. But my company wouldn’t be in business if we eliminated it because everything we do involved some element of risk. Likewise with life. You can reduce your risk, I suppose, by eliminating dangerous activity, but if you choose to get out of bed and take a shower, you’re taking on risk.
Now possibly another plane may have crashed due to the same thing. As an engineer, I shake my head at Boeing's solution. To me, it doesn't seem right to expect pilots to shut down a system when the plane isn't acting right and they are now under duress.
Bob, intellectually we understand that EVERYTHING involves some risk. We've been told that line about how "you start taking risks the moment you get out of bed" for a long time. We get it, right? You could get hit by a bus on the way to work. If that is so, then why do people still believe on some level that FLYING (of all things) will be risk- or danger-free? Why do people express such abject surprise, shock and horror when an airliner hits turbulence, or even when one crashes? Shit happens, people!
For decades we've been warning each other to not get into stranger's cars. Now, with Uber and Lyft we encourage it! Parents send their underage children in Ubers. Are we crazy? Or is it simply that there is little collective learning passed down from generation to generation. (No, getting in a Uber is not exactly the same as getting into the car of a complete unknown stranger...but it's close!)
Ed, this last 737 accident (Ethiopian Airlines) is very puzzling. The radar tracks of the plane show that just after takeoff it began a more or less uncontrolled acceleration to nearly 400 knots(!), which is unusual because that is waaaay above its normal climb speed. It also had large variations of their vertical speed, indicating some sort of problem with their pitch (up and down) control or perhaps throttles. The takeaway is that the plane was definitely *not* in a stabilized climb after departing Addis Ababa.
Could this all be related to the same device Boeing installed to discretely "help" pilots deal with low-speed (stall) issues? Or did the crew have some sort of other autopilot problem that they were dealing with? Of course we don't know yet. But we will, shortly, because the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder were recovered.
We might like to think that designing airplanes (especially big airplanes) is an exact science, and that by we know all there is to know about this thing called "flight." But it's not and we don't.
Putting those big engines on the 737 Max-8 upset its low-speed behavior. So Boeing created a little device attached to the flight controls to assist keep the pilots in maintaining control of the plane. Could they have predicted every conceivable failure mode? Should they have? Testing and imagination can only go so far. When it comes to aviation, there is still much undiscovered country.
Well, yeah... point taken. I guess I'm just looking at it from the fact I spend countless more hours in a car at the mercy of other drivers, who might be distracted or impaired, than I do in a plane, where hopefully the pilot is not distracted or impaired. Therefore, it's less likely I'll die the plane. But as you said, it all comes down to fallible humans - whether drivers, pilots, doctors, or whomever. Humans make errors and life is risky.
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