What NASA Won't Tell You About Air Safety 411
rabble writes "According to a report out of Washington, NASA wants to avoid telling you about how unsafe you are when you fly. According to the article, when an $8.5M safety study of about 24,000 pilots indicated an alarming number of near collisions and runway incidents, NASA refused to release the results. The article quotes one congressman as saying 'There is a faint odor about it all.' A friend of mine who is a general aviation pilot responded to the article by saying 'It's scary but no surprise to those of us who fly.'"
This really that bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
The really dangerous part about air travel.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Flying is so much safer than driving to the airport it is not even funny.
Is it really NASA who is witholding info? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to sound like some NASA apologist or something but in my experience with large institutions many of the things done "by NASA" or some other group are often the work of one or a few key individuals and many times may run counter to the very goals of the institution and most people involved in it. It wouldn't surprise me if the political appointee that replaced the kid is doing this.
meh (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously though, I try to remind myself that the pilots are just as interested in getting to the destination in one piece as I am.
My question is (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:He should have never stopped snorting coke (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The really dangerous part about air travel.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Watch the Sky (Score:2, Insightful)
It's official: Embarassment == Security Threat (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazing. Once upon a time, the only valid reason for withholding information was if it would affect the nation's security. Now, "commercial welfare" is just as valid as "national security".
How many other documents can now be hidden from public view, given the low bar of "could materially affect the public confidence"? Apparently, if you're not "confident", you're with the terrorists!
Definition of a "near miss?" (Score:2, Insightful)
Aren't actual accidents the issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, I've been driving about 14 years without ever causing an accident (or at least, none that I was involved in to know of
Fo example, you start to do a lane change, and suddenly, before you actually enter the other lane, you notice another car there, and abort the lane change. The point of driving experience and skill is it also helps you to cope with the near-accidents that your driving skills failed to prevent.
Surely something similar is relevant to flying too?
Re:This really that bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with you on your point - air travel is incredibly safe by nearly every measure that matters. Crashes, fatalities, etc.
You simply can't be safe all the time. You can't. As you sit there right now, look down. How old is your surge surpressor? Is it within it's lifetime as specified by the manufacturer? Is your seat ergonomically correct, and is your computer sitting at exactly the right height? No, you probably won't die from carpal tunnel, but it's "unsafe" to work in the manner you are doing so right now.
I work for one of the big 3, and I can't tell you how much emphasis we put on safety, and still people die. Look at all the work put into passenger car safety. Look at all the law enforcement, traffic signals, and safety equipment on the cars. Despite all that work, someone can throw up the horrify XXXX many people were killed this year. It looks bad until you consider how many car trips there were.
When is the last time you slipped on ice? Merged without signalling? Ran with scissors? Cut towards your hands?
Why are we worried about this, exactly, and not about more important things like how we are going to pay social security to the baby boomers? (that's rethorical, in case you missed it...)
Re:Isn't this report the FAA's job? (Score:2, Insightful)
Every job I've worked.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This really that bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that pilots were given anonymity, but there are plenty of incidents that could be recognized by the description (it's not hard to figure out which airlines fly a lot of routes -- Southwest and JetBlue, for example, are the only carriers between a lot of secondary airports).
If the report is published to the greater world then pilots might not be as forthcoming about future incidents and we might lose a good chance to prevent an accident. Without knowing more about the report, why it was developed, who developed it, and what good it does I can't say for sure whether that's the right answer or not, but it's at least a reasonable answer. There's no conspiracy here, sorry.
Re:And still... (Score:3, Insightful)
If we still had legions of penny-a-day, disposable immigrants and virtually no opposition to laying track through high-value suburbs then we might have the ability to put in light rail. But we don't...on either count...so it will never happen. Rail is phenomenally expensive to put in, and nobody wants it in their back yard. It will never be commercially viable in the US except in dense areas (which, not too surprisingly, is what much of Europe looks like).
Also, high-speed rail has the same annoying problem as high-speed internet - the last mile is very tough to cover. Airports have that problem, too, but rail is going to have to do _better_ to compensate for the inherent slower travel speeds.
Besides - more rail traffic means more chances of collision, and I would guess (though I can't back it up) that there have been more US rail crashes in the last 5 years than US commercial airline crashes (including both passenger and freight).
Growing up we had a saying... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."
Re:legal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do the math, THEN panic (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone in government ever bother to READ the reports they spend so much time and money writing and classifying?
Re:The really dangerous part about air travel.... (Score:5, Insightful)
- Drive for a living, with frequent retraining and certification
- Drive only on well-defined shifts
- Receive instructions from road controllers
- Make sure their cars are regularly serviced
- Have proximity detectors and redundant steering controls in their cars
- Have co-drivers who can take over if there's a problem
If you really want to make the comparison, it's between a plane and a bus. Have you been on a Greyhound lately?
Re:This really that bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're living in a fantasy world. It only takes one- and really, it doesn't even take an idiot. Ever had a blowout on the highway? Would you call yourself an idiot if a piece of debris you couldn't see caused one and sent you into a crash? Didn't think so. Doesn't change the good chance of death you have as a result.
Oh, and are you always the driver when you're in a car? Never let anyone else drive? Never taken a taxi, or a shuttle bus of some sort?
The numbers are very simple. Compare the number of plane trips per year and number of plane deaths with the number of car trips per year and the number of car deaths. The plane related incidents are almost statistically unnoticeable in this country. Car crashes, on the other hand, are one of the leading causes of death.
Re:Close != close call (Score:2, Insightful)
You keep on using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Please do not use doubletalk; words designed to make bad things sound better
Please don't quote someone (George Carlin) without citing them. Thank you.
Re:This really that bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
Absolutely true (Score:4, Insightful)
* Taken 16 flights
* Experienced zero accidents or near incidents involving aircraft
* Witnessed zero accidents or near incidents involving aircraft
However:
* Witnessed three auto accidents en-route to airport
* Witnessed one auto accident en-route to home from airport
* Taxi driver taking me home from airport narrowly avoided a severe collision
Flying doesn't scare me in the slightest, but I sometimes find myself nervous when I have to fly. Can you guess from the above experiences why? Safety at the airport in my home town is scrutinised very closely and by all appearances seems to be top notch. On the other hand, the city seems to have no qualms about planning several simultaneous construction projects along a single route, replete with inadequate road markings, constantly changing signal configurations and restricted lanes...which don't mix well at all with drivers who ignore the reduced speed limits and feel that they absolutely must not leave one or more car-length of space between themselves and the vehicle they are following, lest someone has the gall to cut in front of them.
The article of discussion here stated that there is one in-flight fatality per MILLIONS of departures--I bet more people die golfing than flying and certainly driving is several orders of magnitude more risky. Roads are WAY more crowded than runways and airspace, aircraft are in MUCH better condition and far more reliable than automobiles and pilots are FAR more skilled and competent than even some of the better drivers on the road.
It seems to me that even if NASA's interviews suggest incidents are under-reported by half that overall air safety is quite good and certainly not worth the alarmist tones by those involved. If there is ANYTHING about air travel we should be concerned about, beyond the hazardous road trip to the airport (if it isn't the construction-infested road to the airport at home it is the dangerously confusing interchanges and signage at other large airports), it is the screwed up state of security at airports. Recent surveys have shown that security gate personnel have been extremely good at confiscating grandma's knitting needles, threatening toiletries and risky bottles of Evian, but when it comes to REAL security they have been almost criminally neglectful.
For example, in LAX testers placed very obvious-looking bomb components into checked luggage (batteries with wires and circuitry attached, realistic-appearing explosives, etc) and 3 out of 4 times it cleared security. In the recent past air cargo security has been circumvented up to 90 percent of the time. At the airport I take off from regularly a mentally disturbed person scaled the perimiter fence, wandered onto the runways and tried to flag down a commercial jumbo jet preparing for takeoff. In Montreal a reporter crawled under a similar fence, got into an unlocked maintenance truck and started it up. Then he put on a smock and waled right into the CARA kitchen preparing food for the next departing flight posing as an inspector. Nobody questioned his presence, asked for ID or anything.
Trust me, if you were to be injured or killed during a flight--extremely unlikely as it is, you probably stand a greater chance of it being because some nutjob jihadist checked a bomb, or infiltrated airport security and poisoned the in-flight food, than because of mechanical failure or runway incursions or mid-air collisions or birds meeting their maker inside a jet engine.
Re:Fantasy? Not so much... (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, so the solution to make roads safer is that we need to make sure everyone has a bigger than average car, right? Also, no matter how big your car is, if you strike a large enough concrete object or tree, you still die. Is your car also safe against people who run over red lights and hit you on the side?
Second, the "safety" of airlines is always touted by considering total miles traveled, not TIME IN THE VEHICLE
When you want to go from point A to point B, and you consider whether to do it by car of by plane, it's the *distance* that's constant, not the time.
Let's turn the tables, shall we? OK, airlines, if you're going to include teenage hotrod and dead-drunk idiots in your road statistics, I'm gonna include all the private airplanes that are busy dropping out of the sky on a daily basis. Who wins now?
Airplanes still win -- by a large amount.
About statistics, they should include everything, both for planes and for cars. "But what about the statistics of people who live on my street have my name and drive the same car as I do?" This is not statistics, this is anecdote.
Re:This really that bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
A few other arguments: plane crashes are not at all unsurvivable. I don't know which tend to be more survivable, and it's somewhat an apples and oranges comparison, but at least I can admit when I haven't done the research. And there are extremely strict requirements for being an airline pilot, and their performance is regularly checked, something you certainly can't say about cars. So those pilots are much better qualified to fly than you are to drive.
What it boils down to is you feel more confident with a higher-risk activity that gives you more illusion of control. I guess there's nothing wrong with that viewpoint, as long as you don't pretend it's logical.
Re:The really dangerous part about air travel.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Close calls (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Close != close call (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Close != close call (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Close != close call (Score:3, Insightful)
Hehe. I guess that part didn't come out very well. The point being, just like in a car, you follow your lane. For planes, the lane is imaginary but enforced by regulation and/or ATC. By procedure, pilots stay in their lanes. Depending on the type of flying, regulations even specify the width of the lane.