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 large part of it has to do with the inconsistency of car maintenance and use. If something breaks on a car, it could be a common defect across all cars, or it could be the fact that the driver ran over a curb and damaged something.
Planes are much more consistent in terms of wear and tear, as well as maintenance. So when something goes wrong with one, there’s a higher probability that it’s going to go wrong on multiple planes of the same type. If it’s a known thing to watch for, it’s usually on an inspection list, so they on the look out. Fleets get grounded when something they weren’t watching for goes wrong.
If it’s something unique to one plane, they will work to identify it(e.g. the door blew out because a small meteor hit it) but the commonality among planes means that you assume they’re going to break down the same way until you can prove otherwise.
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