Post: #51

^ You gotta have something to back up that theory with.

Post: #52

^I couldn't find. I don't think there even is any way to prove this. That's why I said I might be wrong. But you can just look at how they are calculating this ''safety'', it's fatality/miles. So they are not taking into consideration the fact that the average person spends 1-2 hours in car or bus every day and 1-2 hours in plane every year, and he can't take the plane to work. So airline might be the safest way only when you can take the plane instead of car, because car ride will be far more dangerous when driving to distant cities for hours. But driving safely in your city for 100 hours every year will be much safer than flying for 100 hours every year in which case there is not much you can do to increase your safety.

(12-30-2014 04:39 PM)turkishcandy Wrote:  

(12-30-2014 01:35 PM)LeBeau Wrote:  

(12-28-2014 10:12 AM)berserk Wrote:  Not good. I always considered Air Asia safe, but are there even any airlines left in the world which haven't crashed lethally?

By this logic, you should be swearing off cars, trains, etc.

"Are there even any car companies left in the world that haven't had a lethal crash?"

The statistics for air travel speak for themselves, just think rationally about things, this crash is nothing to get spooked about.

Actually, airline is only safer when you travel, meaning when you drive or take the train to the same destination it takes a lot longer than flying and you are more likely to crash than in a short flight. But, as far as I remember, you spend so little time in the air and so much time in the car every day that every minute you spend in an airplane turns out to be more dangerous than every minute you spend driving to work and back home. That's why you should read between the lines when they say ''airline is the safest way to travel''. I might be wrong, I read this some time ago, but apart from traveling you are safer inside a car or train, considering the amount of time you spend in each and the fatality rates.

(12-30-2014 04:46 PM)Chaos Wrote:  ^ You gotta have something to back up that theory with.

Post: #53

I'm fairly sure that Freakonomics book looked into it and confirmed what turkishcandy claims.

Post: #54

^^Along that same train of thought..I'd be curious to see what percentage of pilots die "on the job." I wonder if such statistics exist. That would be a pretty good proxy for what your chances of dying in a plane crash are if you fly regularly for decades.

Post: #55

(12-30-2014 05:32 PM)berserk Wrote:  I'm fairly sure that Freakonomics book looked into it and confirmed what turkishcandy claims.

Yeah! Thank you. That's where I read it. Love that book.

Post: #56

(12-30-2014 05:08 PM)turkishcandy Wrote:  But driving safely in your city for 100 hours every year will be much safer than flying for 100 hours every year in which case there is not much you can do to increase your safety.

They are not taking it into account because it is irrelevant, for the exact reasons you stated in your own argument.

In any case though, Wikipedia has these statistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_sa..._of_travel

Deaths per billion hours, car: 130
Deaths per billion hours, plane: 30.8

By the way, you can drive as safely as you can as much as you want, but the drunk fuck in the other lane swerving into you won't care much about that.

Post: #57

(12-31-2014 12:35 AM)atlant Wrote:  

(12-30-2014 05:08 PM)turkishcandy Wrote:  But driving safely in your city for 100 hours every year will be much safer than flying for 100 hours every year in which case there is not much you can do to increase your safety.

They are not taking it into account because it is irrelevant, for the exact reasons you stated in your own argument.

In any case though, Wikipedia has these statistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_sa..._of_travel

Deaths per billion hours, car: 130
Deaths per billion hours, plane: 30.8

By the way, you can drive as safely as you can as much as you want, but the drunk fuck in the other lane swerving into you won't care much about that.

Excerpt from Freakonomics, the reason why I started this argument:

Quote:If you are taking a trip and have the choice of driving or flying, you might wish to consider the per-hour death rate of driving versus flying. It is true that many more people die in the United States each year in motor vehicle accidents (roughly forty thousand) than in airplane crashes (fewer than one thousand). But it’s also true that most people spend a lot more time in cars than in airplanes. (More people die even in boating accidents each year than in airplane crashes; as we saw with swimming pools versus guns, water is a lot more dangerous than most people think.) The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying, however, is about equal. The two contraptions are equally likely (or, in truth, unlikely) to lead to death.

In your link, although it gives a 4 times higher rate for cars than for planes, trains have still lower fatality per hour than planes.

Quote:Air:30.8 Bus:11.1 Rail:30 Car:130 ( Deaths per billion hours)

So buses and trains are still safer than planes (according to Wikipedia which anyone can edit), and cars are just as safe according to Freakonomics, a much more thoroughly done research. Either way, even your link alone proves my point. How is what I'm saying irrelevant exactly? I said planes are only safest when you travel distances, not the safest transportation vehicle to be inside at any moment, and I was right. 1 hour of bus ride is safer than 1 hour of flight.

Post: #58

It's irrelevant because this:

Quote: I said planes are only safest when you travel distances

is true for just about any real world situation. But in any case - you are talking about trains and buses now. Yes, the numbers for those are equal or a bit lower. However the point you made earlier, and which I wanted to address, was:

Quote:But driving safely in your city for 100 hours every year will be much safer than flying for 100 hours every year

Now, even you are stating that the numbers at at best merely equal. So it seems we can agree to throw out that nonsense, at least.

And sure "everybody can edit Wikipedia" but false information gets deleted quickly. In this case the data cited is from a research paper.

Post: #59

Ok, so this is far out but 13 days before a guy on a Chinese Forum warned to not fly Malaysian Airlines (in general) because they are being targeted by the "Black Hand" (Which is a real mafia like organization).

Link to forum. Use Google Translate.

It's just a weird coincidence that three planes from Malaysian Airlines went down?

Post: #60

^ Yes.

Post: #61

Quote:It's just a weird coincidence that three planes from Malaysian Airlines went down?

This last plane was AirAsia, not Malaysian Air.

Post: #62

(12-31-2014 05:52 PM)Capitán Peligroso Wrote:  

Quote:It's just a weird coincidence that three planes from Malaysian Airlines went down?

This last plane was AirAsia, not Malaysian Air.

But the last three planes that have gone down have all been from Malaysia-based airlines.

Post: #63

(12-28-2014 01:28 PM)berserk Wrote:  The fact is there are several similarities with the AF447 as I understand it:

1) Encountering heavy thunderstorms
2) Asking/Wanting to climb to 38.000 ft to go over instead of around, but by doing so making the plan far more exposed due to poorer handling from thinner air, giving a very small margin of error in case of something like a stall.
3) Airbus planes with known pitot tubes issues (speed tracking), the 330 model also had issues in the past, leading to autopilot to disengage.
4) Possible authoritarian old school pilot taking a break and subordinates not questioning due to Asia deference culture.

It seems very likely that some or all of the above could be implicated.

After reading the article linked and studying some more, I am not going to fly Airbus unless I can't possibly avoid it and I also think it is a good idea to check for Western/Northern Euro pilots who are not afraid to question superiors. Also check for thunderstorms beforehand.

I'm going to quote my own post here with the recent news:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...amage.html

Quote:The crashed AirAsia QZ8501 flight was climbing at "beyond normal" speed before it apparently stalled, Indonesia's transport minister has said, citing radar data.

Quote:He added that investigators were now looking at the "possibility of plane damage and human factors," without giving further details.

Seems like as evidence comes out, it will be more likely to be similar to the Air France crash.

I am probably not going to be flying with Airbus if heavy thunderstorms are reported.

Post: #64

A friend of mine just got type certified on the A320. He recently posted a cockpit shot with flight attendant made cookies and said he went 2+ hours on a short flight without ever touching the controls.

I've seen the guy handle a Cessna plenty as a flight instructor, so I have no doubt as to his basic stick and rudder skills. However as referenced by that AF447 article on page 1, I don't trust prospective airline pilots who get minimal hand flying hours and then are rushed into simulators/automated jets who then spend a tiny fraction of their career actually manipulating an aircraft via manual control.

Worth reading for anyone interested in this subject:

http://www.flyingmag.com/technique/profi...and-rudder

Quote:We’ve seen, in the Buffalo commuter accident and the Air France 447 tragedy over the Atlantic, situations in which flight crews were trained from the beginning on and “flying” only sophisticated, glass-cockpit airplanes that depend on autopilots. In modern, preprogrammed, fly-by-wire airliners, hand-flying is not only discouraged but also prohibited. A recent statistic put the average hand-flying time per leg of a commuter flight at 80 seconds.

This sort of thing makes me less than comfortable with commercial aviation, to put it mildly.

Post: #65

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the thought that modern airplane pilots don't know what a stall is. I can't speak for this crash, but in Air France case, the warning system was notifying them about it for several minutes and no one ever thought of lowering the nose.

For comparison, that would be somewhat like a surgeon not knowing what "cardiac arrest" is.

Post: #66

(01-20-2015 11:59 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the thought that modern airplane pilots don't know what a stall is. I can't speak for this crash, but in Air France case, the warning system was notifying them about it for several minutes and no one ever thought of lowering the nose.

For comparison, that would be somewhat like a surgeon not knowing what "cardiac arrest" is.

If I recall correctly, I don't think they believed the computer and they had a couple of relatively inexperienced panicky assholes flying.

Your comparison is a good one. But imagine if instead of a surgeon you just had some guy who knew the general gist of how to perform bypass surgery but never really did it himself, just performed a bunch of simulations and managed the robot doing the surgery on you.

9.9 times out of 10 everything would be fine, but there's always that one time when someone who has skills and confidence built up from doing it again and again needs to step in due to unforeseen circumstances and take charge to keep shit from going south. If that person doesn't exist, you're fucked.

Post: #67

(01-20-2015 11:59 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the thought that modern airplane pilots don't know what a stall is. I can't speak for this crash, but in Air France case, the warning system was notifying them about it for several minutes and no one ever thought of lowering the nose.

For comparison, that would be somewhat like a surgeon not knowing what "cardiac arrest" is.

Not quite true but I take your point in general. With Air France one of the problems was that the chief Captain thought the stick was being pushed forwards when in fact the co-pilot was pulling back the whole time hence causing the stall. The chief captain had been asleep at the start of the crises and when he returned to the cockpit took the third seat behind the pilots ( he should as captain and the most flight hours have taken control ), the position of his seat meant that he could not see the co-pilot pulling the joystick back once the stall warning occurred since the stick on the Airbus A330 is not central but to the side. Once the chief pilot realized what was happening they were too low in altitude to drop the nose and dive. A total fuck up that cost hundreds of lives.

RIP

Post: #68

Its not fair to compare cars, trucks and buses to planes when it comes to accidents.

Any asshole can get behind a wheel and kill people. An hour of youtube dash cam videos could teach anyone that but pilots are held to a much higher standard. When things go wrong in a plane they go wrong very quickly and the result is either near miss or death.

Post: #69

The Malaysian Insider Wrote:Warning alarms in AirAsia flight QZ8501 were "screaming" as the pilots desperately tried to stabilise the plane just before it plunged into the Java Sea last month, a crash investigator said today.

The noise of several alarms – including one that indicated the plane was stalling – can be heard going off in recordings from the black box in the Airbus A320's cockpit, the investigator told AFP, requesting anonymity.

"The warning alarms, we can say, were screaming, while in the background they (the pilot and co-pilot) were busy trying to recover," the investigator said, adding the warnings were going off "for some time".

The investigator, from Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC), added that the pilots' voices were drowned out by the sound of the alarms.

The revelation came a day after Indonesian Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan said that the plane had climbed abnormally fast before stalling and plunging into the sea, during a flight on December 28 in stormy weather from Indonesia's Surabaya to Singapore.

"In the final minutes, the plane climbed at a speed which was beyond normal," the minister told reporters.

The plane crashed in shallow waters with 162 people on board, but so far just 53 bodies have been recovered.

Divers have been struggling for a week against rough seas and strong currents to reach the plane's main fuselage, which was spotted on the seabed and is thought to contain the bulk of the remaining passengers and crew.

The two black boxes – the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder – were recovered last week after a lengthy search, and investigators are expected to complete a preliminary report next week.

As well as the cockpit voice recorder, the NTSC is examining a wealth of information in the flight data recorder, which monitors every major part of the plane.

They are focusing on the possibility of human or aircraft error, after ruling out terrorism following an analysis of the cockpit voice recorder.

Committee head Tatang Kurniadi said that the preliminary report into the crash would be completed on Tuesday, a month after the accident. He said the full report would not be released publicly but the media would be told some of its contents.

There was a huge international hunt for the crashed plane, involving ships from several countries including the United States and China.

All but seven of those on board the flight were Indonesian. The foreign nationals were from South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Britain and France. – AFP, January 21, 2015.

- See more at: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malay...vKRgB.dpuf

Called this sad tale on day one hour one. How many more CFIT-related catastrophes must the airline industry be subject to before there is a drastic reform on how we fundamentally approach pilot training?


Edit: I realized that if we're being pedantic, Colgan 3407, AF447 and QZ8501 technically fall under the aircraft upset category. However, I think the aviation industry should fold these kind of incidents under the broader CFIT category since from a practical perspective it meets all the definitions:

• Occurs when an airworthy aircraft under the complete control of the pilot is inadvertently flown into terrain, water, or an obstacle - YES, these accidents happen to planes which are definitely airworthy (the temporary lost of pitot tubes does NOT by itself force a plane to dive into the earth), and YES, they are under the complete control of the pilot barring a rare deep stall/flat spin. Basic training on slow flight, stall, and spin recovery is taught by flight instructors well before the student pilot will attempt a solo, because the approach and landing phase of the flight is where the aircraft is simultaneously most likely to experience and most vulnerable to an unintentional stall/spin (lack of altitude to recover). Before they solo, student pilots are expected to be very familiar with the warning signs of an imminent stall/spin and to practice the automatic, complete control of the recovery process until it becomes reflexive and second nature.

• Pilots are generally unaware of the danger until it is too late - YES, although the doomed flight crews of the three example flights above were obviously aware of "a" danger, as a whole they were completely unaware of "THE" danger (stalling the a/c) until it was too late. Although it remains to be seen with QZ8501, Af447 had more than 3 minutes to recognize the stall and pitch the nose down, and Colgan's Q400 stick shaker sounded well before the aircraft ran out of altitude to safely recover.

Post: #70

In regard to the above post, readers should know that "CFIT" means Controlled Flight Into Terrain.

I think what's happened is that we've come full circle from 30-40 years ago where flying planes required far more input from the flight crew. The notion has always been that the overwhelming majority of crashes are due to pilot error, so steps were taken to eliminate pilots from the equation. Fast forward to the present day and we have pilots who really only control the plane for about 5 minutes of the flight (essentially take offs and landings).

I wonder if Thales made the Pitot tubes on this plane?

Post: #71

I'd read that the pilots requested permission to go around a storm and it was denied. I've heard this is a major problem for pilots is getting air control permission to divert around storms. Sometimes they just declare an emergency and deviate from course anyway, even though this could be be a threat to other air traffic crossing paths.

http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2014/12/29/...oid-storm/

It's really crazy how much shit can be going on in the cockpit, while you're in the back calmly watching a movie oblivious to the danger all around you.

I hate being in a plane crossing tropical regions because that type of weather is common. When I look out the window and see towering storms like this my heart starts racing a bit.



The wind shear those storms produce is so extreme that it could break a plane apart like a toy.

Post: #72

AirAsia flight QZ8501: Captain's behaviour 'very unusual' prior to crash, investigators learn



He left his co-pilot in charge but arrived back at his seat too late to save the plane


The captain of the AirAsia jet that crashed into the sea off Indonesia in December was out of his seat conducting an unusual procedure when his co-pilot apparently lost control.

By the time he returned it was too late to save the plane, two people close to the investigation told news agency Reuters.

They said that investigators were examining the Flight Augmentation Computer (FAC) recovered from the Airbus A320, and that the captain had taken the “very unusual” step of disabling the system.

"You can reset the FAC, but to cut all power to it is very unusual," said an A320 pilot, who chose to remain anonymous.

"You don't pull the circuit breaker unless it was an absolute emergency. I don't know if there was one in this case, but it is very unusual."

To do this, the captain would have had to leave his seat, and reach behind the co-pilot.

Experts said the loss of the FAC would not directly alter the trajectory of an aircraft but that it would remove flight "envelope protection", which prevents a pilot from taking a plane beyond its safety limits.

Shortly after the pilot is believed to have disabled the FAC, Flight QZ8501 went into a sharp climb from which investigators have said it stalled or lost lift.

"It appears he (the co-pilot) was surprised or startled by this," said a person close the investigation, referring to the decision to cut power to the FAC.

"The co-pilot pulled the plane up, and by the time the captain regained the controls it was too late."

This contradicts reports earlier this week which claimed the co-pilot was in control at the time of the crash, after the plane’s flight data recorder was analysed.

AirAsia said it would not comment while the matter was under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC) of Indonesia.

Tatang Kurniadi, chief of the NTSC, told Reuters there had been no delay in the captain resuming the controls, but declined further comment.

The Airbus A320 jet plunged into the Java Sea during a flight from Indonesia to Singapore on 28 December, killing all 162 people on board.

Post: #73

This thread is why I just booked tickets on a US carrier instead of the more convenient foreign airlines. Just sayin.

Post: #74

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-31125052

Post: #75

I saw that on Reuters this morning. So fucked up.