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
A few reasons:
1) Even if you could wave a magic wand and disable thousands of defective cars for potential safety issues, you’d immediately remove the only way for most of those people to earn an income or get around at all because of how we’ve built our cities (assuming America or Canada). Airlines can backfill routes with other aircraft with only a short upset to their schedules.
2) Airplane crashes are big, dramatic, usually mass-casualty events. Car crashes kill one or two at a time. Humans are objectively bad at risk analysis and there is far more public outcry to do something about the scary news-making thing rather than the insidious every day one, even if the risk of your Pinto exploding in a rear-end collision is far higher than systems failing on an airliner.
3) Private individuals are responsible for the operations and maintenance of their vehicles, and most people have zero knowledge of what’s required to properly maintain them (outside of, or even including, oil changes), let alone take the time to get even dangerous recalls fixed. Airlines have paid mechanics that work a fairly small number of aircraft models daily, per instructions written and checked by the manufacturer and FAA (and sometimes the airline too), with detailed logs of each modification over the history of the airframe from before it leaves the factory to when it gets retired. You can work out all the issues on a grounded airframe and get them all back into the air far faster than the tens or hundred ms of thousands of who-knows-where-they-are models of a certain car.
Latest Answers