Why are airlines not required by law to update their planes more often and use newer models? Many commercial planes being used today are older than most people on this website.

Question

Is there no safety issue there?

In: Other

Answer 1

The aircraft industry is very tightly regulated for safety.

We tend to think of maintenance it terms of cars where people regularly ignore even basic maintenance like changing the oil, and checking tire pressures. Aircraft are held to much tighter standards.

Aircraft undergo regularly scheduled checks and maintenance to ensure they are in top-condition. The number of operational hours are kept track of and every X number of hours planes have to be X-ray’d and tested for craks, Y hours they engine rebuilds, etc.

Performing this maintenance isn’t cheap, but it’s considerably cheaper than buying multi-million dollar aircraft.

Eventually an aircraft will go time-ex meaning that it has flown too many hours and will no longer be certified or insured to fly. At which point it becomes scrap.

The maintenance aircraft undergo is a big part of the reason the airline industry is as safe as it is. Statistically speaking you are something like 700 times more likely to die in the cab on the way to the airport than in a plane crash.