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 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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