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
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.
Latest Answers