Comment by jcgrillo
1 year ago
> Suing someone into oblivion for an error that has never manifested as a serious failure and that is exceedingly unlikely to manifest is a little excessive.
I appreciate your point of view. The air travel industry is undeniably safe, moreso than any transportation system ever. By a large margin. On the other hand, it is possible to make software systems that do not have the defects described in the article. So how do we get to the place where we choose to build systems that behave correctly? I don't think we get there without severe penalties for failure.
>The air travel industry is undeniably safe, moreso than any transportation system ever.
I disagree: the Japanese shinkansen bullet train system has never had a fatal accident, except for a single incident 30 years ago when someone was caught in a door and dragged 100 meters. No fatalities from collisions, derailings, etc., ever, since the 1960s. That's far safer than air travel could ever claim to be.
Even other train systems have better records than commercial aviation, in general. Plane crashes are rare these days, but they still happen once in a while, and the results are usually catastrophic.
Are planes safer than cars? Well of course, but that's a really, really low bar: cars are driven by all kinds of morons who frequently (esp. in the US) have little to no training or testing, are frequently distracted, don't have a copilot who can take over at any time, and are frequently operating in a very, very chaotic environment (like city streets). It's truly a wonder there aren't more fatal crashes. But safer than trains in general? I seriously doubt it.
Actually, the Shinkansen seems to average ~100 billion passenger-km per year [1] or ~60 billion passenger-miles per year. Using that as a overestimate for the last 60 years, that is a grand total of 3.6 trillion passenger-miles.
US commercial aviation averages ~1 trillion passenger-miles per year [2]. So if we compare the last 4 years of US aviation that is a comparable number of passenger-miles.
Over the last 4 years recorded on this dataset (2019-2022)[3] it looks like there were 5 fatalities total. Over the last 4 years recorded on this dataset (2018-2021)[4] it looks like there were 2 fatalities total.
So, while it does not appear to be safer, it is within a few factors on a passenger-mile basis. Furthermore, there are multiple periods of 4 trillion consecutive passenger-miles where there were 0 recorded accidents. It nowhere near obvious that it is “far safer than air travel could ever claim to be” and certainly a much closer race than you believed given your other assertions.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1262752/japan-jr-high-sp...
[2] https://www.transtats.bts.gov/traffic/
[3] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-air-carrier-safety-data
[4] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
That's not exactly a fair comparison, because you're comparing distances traveled, rather than trips taken. Of course planes are going to look good, since they travel much longer distances than cars or trains, and because planes are more likely to have trouble when taking off or landing than any time in-between. It's not like you can just take a commercial airliner flight to go to your local grocery store, even though statistically you're more likely to get killed on that trip than on a cross-continent flight.
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Elevators would like a word with you.
https://nationalelevatorindustry.org/elevators-escalators-ar...
Their deaths-per-passenger-mile stats are worse, though.
US airlines haven't had a single fatal crash in 15 years.
https://nypost.com/2019/08/22/video-shows-moment-man-crushed...
> So how do we get to the place where we choose to build systems that behave correctly? I don't think we get there without severe penalties for failure.
What failure? The planes work. This is puritanism.