They are so big and it seems like so much could go wrong yet they are statistically extremely successful.
In: Engineering
Because there’s an absurd amount of research and testing during all phases of the design, production, and use of a plane to make sure as few things can go wrong as possible, and that if something does go wrong, that the place can land safely anyway.
Planes undergo extensive periodic testing to make sure they’re still in good condition, and every accident is exhaustively researched by the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), with everything learned from each accident used to improve future plane designs to prevent it from occuring again.
[Safety Research (ntsb.gov)](https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/Pages/default.aspx)
Commercial air travel is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world.
Imagine if it was the same for driving:
– Every new model of car is put through years of testing by a government agency to ensure safety
– Every crash is investigated by that agency and new traffic laws or design changes are mandated every time.
– Every time you bought a new car, you had to study the differences and then retake your drivers test to prove you can drive the new model.
– Every quarter, you had to log simulator time on that car, practicing scenarios that could go wrong. If you fail, you can’t drive until you pass.
– You had a team of mechanics that checked the car out every time you drove it. If there was something off, you didn’t drive until they signed off.
– You logged the mileage on every critical part and replaced them before the broke.
– You had a team of people feeding you real time traffic and weather information so you could take the safest route.
– If the weather is too bad, all driving is canceled until it clears up.
– You had someone in the passenger seat with the exact same training that could take over at a moments notice.
– Every other driver on the road was doing the _exact_ same thing.
If driving had all that, we’d see _far_ fewer crashes.
We’ve adopted a nearly 0 defect mentality with aviation. We accept nearly no risk and mitigate everything else. Theres atleast 3 points of redundancy on a flight critical system on jetliners.
And before anyone is like, “bUt bOeInG.” Even with that, aviation’s track record over the last 30 years is still impeccable.
Imagine if every car on the road was vigorously inspected every time it was to be driven. And then imagine every single driver had to go through a long in-depth schooling process just to be allowed to drive the car. Along with every system in the car having at least one or two backups for anything that can break.
That’s just how planes are.
Systems are double or triple overbuilt for redundancy and have failsafes so parts fail in the “right” way if they do.
Things go wrong all the time. They just don’t end up in crashes because there’s redundancy for just about everything.
Just to give you some numbers.. it’s an order of magnitude more difficult to get your private pilot’s licence vs your drivers licence. For instance it takes a few hundred bucks to get your DL, but about $16,000 to get the PPL.
And it’s an order of magnitude more difficult to get your commercial pilots licence vs your private pilot’s licence. For instance it takes about 50 hours of flying to get the PPL, but about 1500 hours to be a commercial airline pilot.
There is a checklist for everything, every time the is an accident or incident there is a massive investigation to find out why it happened and how to prevent it in future. Air travel is around 750x safer than car travel
Former pilot (student) here with a bit of knowledge on air law.
Every rule is written in blood, is an expression the aviation business use. Meaning that every time something happens – they spend literally millions of $ to figure out exactly what happened. And then for instance FAA tells all aircraft manufactures/airlines than THAT particular bolt that caused this accident, needs to be changed on every aircraft – or they are not allowed to fly over USA.
ICAO is the governing body for much of this – which is the civil aviation part of the UN. Meaning that most laws pertaining aircrafts and how they are flown etc is the same. So a pilot can assume that landing in Spain will be pretty much the same as landing in Italy, and he can assume the ATC speaks english, and know, in details, the same lingo he knows on aviation and rules. And they all have the exact same education, knowing exactly how to speak to each other.
There will not be any mistakes made by the guy in Colombia filling up the aircraft with fuel thinking I meant gallons – no, we ALL agree on what units to use, everywhere. Because a few planes did go down because of some country thinking gallons while the Captain was thinking kgs, and so on. Every single aircraft disaster is treated 100x more closely than a car accident ie.
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