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
The short answer is that cars are held to a lower standard than planes. Aircraft are much more heavily regulated and scrutinised because an air disaster can easily kill hundreds of people per accident. They also disrupt a highly intricate industry and the losses reverbetate across many levels and lose billions.
But that’s not to say that cars do not have similar protocols. Recalls happen for defects that are discovered to affect a large number of vehicles, and notices are sent out to owners and announcements are made since some times it’s hard to track down all vehicles affected when the recalls may go back many years and affect millions of vehicles, many of which may have changed multiple owners. The problem ultimately lies with owners not doing their due dilligence and not checking for recalls on their cars and being completely oblivious to them. If a recall has gone out for a serious defect and an owner has not taken their vehicle in to be fixed free of charge then whose fault is it really?
The other factor at play here is that most car accidents and car fatalities occur through driver error, not defects. Are you saying all people should be barred from driving because some people drive like incompetent idiots and cause serious accidents?
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.
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.
It’s kind of related to logistics.
The airline industry is heavily regulated. If the government says one model of plane isn’t allowed to fly, there happens to be a network of people who are *constantly* watching every plane in the sky and can see if someone breaks the rules. That airline can be penalized up to and including having its ability to operate removed. Then it’s illegal for an airport to allow their planes to board.
Imagine trying to do that with *cars*. Imagine telling a city’s police force they have to write a ticket to every driver of a Toyota Corolla unless they present paperwork indicating they got a safety recall addressed. Police are going to laugh and ignore it. That’s stupid. They’re going to see the same people drive the same cars every day and legally be obliged to pull those people over again? Heck no.
You could say, “Well, don’t let people renew their registration.” Well, sure, but a lot of people will just choose not to renew. It’s already a pretty big problem.
So instead we make the car manufacturers send an obscene amount of mail and make an obscene amount of phone calls to registered owners. That way, if the person doesn’t get the repair, the government is satisfied the manufacturer warned them about the dangers thus that person’s less likely to be able to sue over the damages.
Or, put another way:
You can’t tell if an airline fixed an airplane that has a flaw, so it’s never your fault if you get killed due to their lack of maintenance.
But you are responsible for making all necessary repairs to your car and manufacturers have to make every effort to inform you when they are available. It’s *your* responsibility to avoid driving a car you know is unsafe, and at some point if it causes harm it’s *your* liability.
So we take measures to make the person liable for the harm to stop driving the thing, and they’re the one who gets punished if they ignore it. But the average car recall is for something like “if you get in this kind of accident on a rainy day this sensor will deploy the airbag too late and you might get injured” whereas the average plane grounding is over, “About 30% of the time the autopilot gets confused on takeoff and tries to point the aircraft directly at the ground. If a pilot doesn’t make a perfect series of inputs in response it will crash with significant fatalities.”
If the engine in my car malfunctions I am just stuck at the side of the road. If the engine in my plane malfunctions it’s a whole new ball game
When something goes seriously wrong in a plane, several hundred people may die and several 10s of millions of dollars will be lost. Aviation is so often used because it’s widely trusted and very, very safe. It’s in societies best interest that this remain true.
When something goes seriously wrong with a car, other safety systems usually prevent serious injury. When people die because of a specific design or manufacturing flaw, it’s usually very small numbers.
Less than 20 people in total have died in crashes where it’s claimed the Tesla autopilot was at fault (the number is crashes claimed to be because of the autopilot is actually quite large and the Justice department is investigating)
**tl;dr There is a human bias. Because aviation is so safe, a plane crash stands out and it’s indisputable something went terribly wrong. Car crashes are isolated, not reported together, and spread out over time. Because there is no “big event”, there is little public pressure to get it fixed. Knowing that, industry lawyers then make it hard to force a fix.**
“From an outsider’s perspective, it seems that airplanes are already much safer than cars- so what gives?”
Aircraft are much safer than cars for the very reasons you’re questioning with your post.
Chicken before the egg. Airplanes are so safe partly BECAUSE of the amount of scrutiny around them and the sheer effort that goes into preventing accidents and adding/improving regulations when needed. Safety regulations are written in blood.
Plus, as others have said, you can’t just pull onto the shoulder if something goes wrong in a plane. If something breaks in a car you will be late (these types of failures are in the majority but obviously there are more dangerous potential failures). If something breaks in a plane, 300 people die. It’s a lot more likely to have multiple fatalities from some system failure in an aircraft than there is in a car.
If a car carried 150 people they’d probably recall more often. Refer to [Fight Club](https://youtu.be/SiB8GVMNJkE?si=l-rvMF7pImV17Vul) for formulas.
In addition to the risk factor difference between commercial aircraft and a passenger vehicle, most large passenger aircraft are owned and operated by airline companies, while passenger vehicles are owned by private individuals. Even if Ford was like “You must not drive this vehicle!” there’s no way to enforce it. Southwest airlines will ground a whole fleet of aircraft until a real or perceived safety issue is addressed because they need paying airline customers to continue to trust them to get to their destination.
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