Outside of a brief aside in the movie Fight Club and what I assume are economic reasons, I’ve never seen good compelling reasons why airplanes are grounded for accidents, while cars do not seem to undergo the same level of scrutiny?
Is it just because cars are tested more before they enter the market?
From an outsider’s perspective, it seems that airplanes are already much safer than cars- so what gives?
In: Engineering
Because if anything goes wrong in a car, you can always just pull over and jump out. If anything goes wrong in a plane, there’s no rest stop to pull over.
Planes are way more regulated than cars because of how lethal an unrecoverable accident (or operator error) is.
A serious safety defect in a car will result in a shrill recall notice. But it’s difficult for any one system on a car to endanger people the way a bad autopilot or structural element on a plane will.
Far fewer things go wrong with planes both because they are engineered/tested to a much higher standard and the pilots are far better trained. If every single driver had to log simulator hours at the DMV before they could drive a new model car and had to _repeat_ that several times a year, then car accidents would probably go down dramatically as well.
It is because they are so rare that we take each so seriously. If there is a crash, we want to know _why_, because the amount of testing and training make crashes so unlikely.
A serious car fault may result in it breaking down in the middle of nowhere or absolute worst case scenario- a fatal accident (don’t get me wrong- that’s awful). A serious plane fault can lead to a $100m plane crashing, killing 190 people onboard and a hell of a lot more collateral damage. It’s a scale thing.
Park orders are issued for cars when severe defects are discovered, there’s just no way to actually enforce one and they are, by nature, entirely voluntary.
Cars do get “grounded”, look at the number of recalls, Honda right now has 4.5Million vehicles on a recall for fuel pump issues, Toyota just announced a recall and advisory not to even attempt to drive the vehicle. Vehicle recalls happen all the time, its just not as public as airlines. Numbers vs numbers say vehicles get recalled far more frequently that aircraft. Cars get recalled for simple things like floor mats, or key fobs.
Because if a car stops working there is a good chance you can just stop. If a plane stop working well you are 30,000 feet in the air. Oh yeah and also could be carrying 1000 people.
People die every day in car accidents. Another in the press makes no difference, and most of us go about our lives.
Plane accidents are rare and are big news, so the fallout is bigger
There are three major factors that go into the difference. First: how catastrophic the failure is, how many people each failure effects, and how the failure came to be in the first place.
When a plane fails in a catastrophic manner, it means people die. In a car, even if a wheel falls off or the accelerator is jammed on full, the occupants are likely to survive. Cars are designed to take impacts and have the occupants survive; planes aren’t.
When a car fails, even if it is a deadly failure, you can count the deaths on one hand. A similar failure on a plane is dozens or hundreds of people.
As such, a lot more scrutiny goes into a plane. Everything is supposed to be designed to fail in a safe manner. Maintenance is much stricter and more comprehensive. So if a catastrophic failure occurs, it’s likely that it’s a systemic issue shared by a fleet or airline rather than just the individual airplane that failed.
For a theoretical example, take a look at a door falling off because a critical bolt wasn’t tightened. That is deadly in a plane…merely shocking and inconvenient in a car. If it does cause a catastrophic failure on the off-chance, a whole plane of people die instead of just one or two cars’ worth. And if both were caused by issues in the factory, the car is likely to have one operator that misses every hundredth bolt; that bolt doesn’t get anything more than a visual inspection. In a plane factory, that bolt should have been installed by a calibrated torque wrench, and double checked. If it’s wrong, it’s likely wrong the same exact way on every single plane.
Because there is no enforcement mechanism to prevent people from using a car under recall, and most often the remedy to a recall is *driving* it to a shop.
Commercial trucks often have service agreements with manufacturers that are handled a bit differently but again, if a company wants to send a truck out, very little is stopping them.
An airplane meanwhile needs clearance to take off, it needs a runway, the ATC can very effectively ground a plane. And any major airport will generally have a maintenance building on the premises that a plane can be taxi’d to when it is unfit for flight.
Not just economic reasons but if you suddenly immobilized 2 million cars and some of those people are going to have medical and other emergencies, it becomes a moral issue – does a recall on an improperly assembled ignition warrant immobilizing a vehicle when the workaround is to not have a heavy keychain?
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