Transport Tycoon Forums

In what has been a terrible year for air travel already, over the past 2 days, two further aircraft incidents have occured, one yesterday, and one today.

Firstly, an ATR 72-500 operated by TransAsia Airways aircraft came down on Penghu Island. The death toll is currently recorded as 48 lives lost and 10 survivors. 52 passengers were Taiwanese, with 2 French nationals also aboard. The incident is speculated to have been caused by Typhoon Matmo.

Source 1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-28457657
Source 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransAsia_ ... Flight_222


Secondly, an Air Algerie plane has today been confirmed as missing, possibly crashed. The MD83 went missing over Mali, and was carrying 110 passengers and 6 crew. Fifty of the passengers are thought to be French. The BBC are yet to mention if it is confirmed to have crashed, but many other articles are saying otherwise.

Source 1: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28460625
Source 2: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 25270.html
Source 3: http://en.itar-tass.com/world/742134

Another few incidents of tragic losses of life, this year seems to have no end to the tragedies in the skies.

This leads me to a question, is this a genuinely bad year for air travel, or do these incidents happen more often than we think, and it's only making it to mainstream news due to the previous incidents with MH17/MH370?

Redirect Left wrote:This leads me to a question, is this a genuinely bad year for air travel, or do these incidents happen more often than we think, and it's only making it to mainstream news due to the previous incidents with MH17/MH370?

Air travel is still a perfectly safe way to travel, there is no doubt about that. I think I read somewhere before that on any given day there are some 90,000+ air movements worldwide. This year so far, there have been 14 actual crashes, including military as well (possibly more - I'm going by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:A ... ts_in_2014) Not including incidents like Ryanair clipping wings with another plane or BA wacking into a building at Johannesburg airport) My maths isn't great, but certainly less than 1% of all flights. You can scroll back by year on that wikipedia link. Some years have more, some less.

I think it's just a tragic coincidence that these have happened so close together, but I don't believe there are more accidents now then there generally are. With the extensive media coverage surrounding MH370, MH17 and further back the coverage surrounding AF447, I think makes everyone pay more attention to accidents and make it seem worse than it actually is.

Of course, still tragic for everyone involved.

0.015% in crude terms. Don't worry about plane travel, the one positive from these accidents is that the air industry always learns from them.

I do wonder what the level of best-practice transfer is in the aviation industry. In the rail industry, it certainly seems as if some countries are better than others.

Well Korean air got there in the end. See the book Outliers for more info.

Yeah all the facts about it being hugely safe are irrelevant if you're in the unlucky 0.015%.

I would think there are probably a lot of accidents in ELDCs that go unreported, or under-reported because the UK's media only tends to take an interest where British people are involved. Korean Air might have been behind but it's from a relatively rich country.

The percentage given is total rubbish; given 90000 per day and 195 days or so this year; the true percentage is 0.00008; this seems like an understatement of total aircraft movements anyway which would negate to some extent any under reporting from LEDCs... Anyway the other point is far more people die on the roads; but how often do you hear about that on the news?

EXTspotter wrote:Anyway the other point is far more people die on the roads; but how often do you hear about that on the news?

Only when a larger number of people are involved. Like a bus accident or something. News is only news if a large number of people are involved.

Thing is though that while on the ground most people have a sense that they can do something to survive. Even though that may not be the case. With an aircraft though, the instant you take off your life is in somebody else's hands. And that is also percieved as such.

FooBar wrote:Thing is though that while on the ground most people have a sense that they can do something to survive. Even though that may not be the case. With an aircraft though, the instant you take off your life is in somebody else's hands. And that is also percieved as such.

That is correct. The level to which you can claim 'ownership' of your risk is highly important to its perception.

The other factor however, is what I would call the 'liberal' theory of risk (I'm sure it has another name, but I piece it together from other theories). In a similar way to business failure being an inevitable function of capitalist freedom, human failure (death) is an inevitable failure of human freedom. We don't report road deaths so much since we view it as the inalienable right to drive motor vehicles. In the same way, large sectors of American society simply just accept repeated mass shootings, since gun control would restrict their ability to carry weapons.

In summary, we accept much higher risk when the risk is not just individualised, but distributed across society. We feel as if we can take responsibility for our own actions, but we also feel that we have no right to infringe on others actions because the reverse could also happen at any time and we wouldn't want that. Society has made a collective agreement not to restrict our freedoms, even though we'd be safer off overall. The narrower you can pinpoint responsibility for risk, the more wary we get; after all in an accident, the media will always centre on the driver or pilot.

Ah yes. I picked the numbers as being 90000 a year, quite obviously massively wrong.

Dave wrote:Yeah all the facts about it being hugely safe are irrelevant if you're in the unlucky 0.015%.

Air travel is only safer in % of travels that occur incidents, as far as I have read, if you are in the % that suffers an incident, you are a lot more likely to be injured fatally than any other method of transport, this includes sinking boats, derailed trains, being flung from a motorcycle and other generally bad things that can occur on transport.

Of course, could be wrong, It's just what i read once many years ago. Certainly put me off using aircraft!


edit: an amendment to the Air Algérie incident, it has since been confimed there were no survivors (BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28479681)

I can still say that air crashes still happen less frequently than other mode crashes - road vehicles being the most frequent. Although most of the time once air crash happens, many casualties are resulted.

well in UK and europe - very rare to have railway derailment also ferries which is very good - most people might get scared of flying cause the safety and number of crashes recently but if more crashes means more people will turn to other modes like road or rail or ferry or cruise

If anyone has ever wondered what is actually within a blackbox, Metro have a video on this article here, was a little more basic than i was anticipating (the contents, not the video)
http://metro.co.uk/2014/07/21/ever-wond ... r-4805078/

If it's anything like an On Train Data Recorder (OTDR) then it is pretty basic. Very simple data recording equipment.

Less to go wrong - you want to make sure that they're extremely reliable.

Dave wrote:If it's anything like an On Train Data Recorder (OTDR) then it is pretty basic. Very simple data recording equipment.

Indeed. Basically just lots of boards, and then a single board with all the data storage capacity on it, which is the only part of the Black Box that is actually guaranteed crash proof.