Ask the pilot discusses airline communication.
Millions of people, we know, are anxious fliers. This is the insurmountable result of human nature as much as anything else; all the statistics and straight talk in the world won’t overcome a certain, perfectly understandable reluctance toward racing through the air in giant metal tubes filled with explosive fuel. But clearly the airlines, as lazy and ineffective communicators, have made a difficult situation worse.
If I go to the underlying safety method used, and I say I calculate an allowable failure rate measured in flight hours or operating hours, and that any given piece of equipment is designed to take the abusive environment for between tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of hours:
1. The public wants to know why I don’t design equipment that doesn’t fail,
2. The media wants to know if that means I am actually calculating how many people are going to die on airlines each year. And why I don’t just design equipment that doesn’t fail.
The airlines have nothing to gain talking to the public.
The public doesn’t regulate us and the public has no memory.
The public has no idea the safety record of the carrier, they do not reward the safety records of the airlines, the public still goes to the web and buys the cheapest ticket. They would buy the cheapest ticket if they only had a 50/50 chance of getting there.
Fortunately we are heavily regulated by watchdogs that understand us in the tiniest detail. They don’t talk to the public either.
The airlines, day in and day out, prove that the “market” is not the answer in every instance. Of course profit hungry airline executives are going to weigh profit to the detriment of safety. And why not, there’s no absolute, clear line to overstep when managing maintenance, pilot training, work force scheduling, etc. Management will cut and cut until an airline oversteps and people die. Then, the public is outraged. Government calls for knee jerk responses. Management practices swing the other way.
We need more federal regulation and enforcement with respect to plane maintenance, upgrade to technology and pilot work rules. This has been apparent for years and will only get solved more government rather than less.
Until then, I’d stay off of regional carriers flying anything less than a late model 737.
And why not, there’s no absolute, clear line to overstep when managing maintenance, pilot training, work force scheduling, etc
I’ll give you workforce rules, and certainly pilot workforce rules – but maintenance is extremely clear-cut, and one whistle-blower can cost you all the profits you would have made – most are smart enough to leave maintenance alone.
Do you mean to tell me that there’s something the government does that actually keeps us safe?
Who would’a thunk it.
In this respect, yes.
Getting money for airspace and ground equipment upgrades – ehh. ATC is still using some pretty old gear – it works, just makes their job harder / takes more people.
But we share the same general attitude – everytime someone wants to talk to me about government health care I think about the Veterans Administration.
That then leaves the question (at least to me):
Why does the government pay so much more attention to airline safety rather than automobile safety? There are about 35,000 auto related deaths per year in the US as compared to the less than 1000 deaths per year related to airplanes. (I’m guessing at the 1000.)
I’m not asking for more auto safety rules, I’m questioning the mindset. The mindset doesn’t seem to be related to the actual thing that needs to be controlled. i.e. Actual number of deaths.
My guess is that airplane deaths ALWAYS result in headlines where auto deaths are invisible somehow. Witness that an airliner crash in Bosnia results in headlines here.
Could this be because newspeople are just like us? We know cars MUCH better than we know airplanes.
Just some rambling!
What’s clear-cut about maintenance is the requirement to check-off according to a prescribed schedule relating to specific equipment functions. But, there is still room for management discretion as to the quality (or shoddiness) of that maintenance, the maintenance of areas not being specified, and the underlying question of whether equipment has approached or past useful life.
I used to ride “flying cigars” (a turbo prop with single seats on each side of the aisle) of one commuter airline, until a fellow was almost sucked out the plane when the window popped out mid-flight. He was saved only because his shoulders wouldn’t fit through the hole. While I don’t know, I would suppose that no maintenance schedule violation occurred.
I think the sub-contracting that goes on between the majors and commuter airlines are a real source problems. Majors sub-contract as a means of lowering the quality of air travel into specific markets. The sub-contractors don’t have the same economic incentives as the majors do for a number of things, including safety. For instance, they have no brand name to protect since they operate under the name of the major. Given this industry structure, it shouldn’t be surprising that quality, and hence, safety suffers.