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
Very simple approach.
If a single car crashes due to a safety issue, out of tens of thousands produced, the worst that can happen is a handful of lives lost. If it’s a batch issue of a hundred impacted cars, it’ll be realized when the fatality count is still in the sub-20 range.
A single plane is hundreds of people. That don’t have the ability to say “this doesn’t seem safe so I’m not flying,” since the airline can swap their plane up through the moment of boarding. And when it’s very clearly a mechanical failure, you just ground the fleet long enough to say “was it maintenance or manufacturing,” and then if it’s manufacturing, is it a production lot or the fleet.
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