My father has been designing and building bespoke aircraft for 45 years, was an FAA test pilot, inspector, and trainer for most of that time, and was in the US Air Force during the Korean War. He has more aviation experience than most.
His license plate reads GO RAIL and he won’t fly commercial if he can avoid it.
e: I am not surprised.
Sure, but... commercial airliners almost never crash?
Most planes in general don’t crash, fwiw. Most trains and cars don’t, either.
But would you rather your Uber was a Camry or a Lada Niva?
Planes are vastly safer than trains.
"Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 20 times higher than for buses, 17 times higher than for passenger trains, and 595 times higher than for scheduled airlines."
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
Worth noting that the per-mile and per-trip stats are different. Planes have low per-mile rates because nobody sane is using a plane to get across town. They only use planes for long-distance trips where driving/taking the train isn’t feasible. So by default, planes will have low per-mile rates because virtually every trip is a high mileage event. In short, planes drastically water down their per-mile averages.
When you look at it from a per-trip viewpoint, cars are safer. Which makes sense. You drive to work hundreds of times per year, but maybe ride a plane twice? So a single car crash is going to be a drop in the bucket when compared to the thousands of car trips you’ve taken in your life, but a single plane crash will be a massive spike in the numbers.
I just wanted to point out how statistics can be used to justify either side. Lots of people want to rely on numbers for everything, as if statistics can’t be manipulated. But they can, and you can bet your ass that if a party has a vested interest in stats showing one result over another, a team of statisticians can figure out a way to make it happen.
In 95% of all car accidents, the driver has eaten carrot in the week prior to the accident.
you may now draw your own conclusion
After all of the high profile train derailments in recent history, primarily caused by decaying infrastructure, bad standards, and cutting corners, makes me wonder if there's someone with an extensive background in rail out there with a license plate that says "FLY AIR".
I guess it's really just a question of whether you take the risk you know or the one you don't.
That's cargo rail tho. Fatal passenger rail accidents are very rare and involve multiple human and system failures.
I am an Aerospace Engineer (I was an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer by trade prior to going to University) and I have spent the last 30 years in the airline industry….it isn’t as bad as you are allegedly making it out to be….pilots are not engineers either…..
Experience from the 60’s and 70’s isn’t really relevant to today’s industry- I started in the early 90’s and it’s massively different today from back then….so your point is?
I am also based in Australia so that might also make a bit of a difference because we have had no airline crashes in this country and we have a very strict Potentially Unwanted Parts (PUP’s) system and other checks and balances that because we are under EASA based regulations and not FAA ones (who, by the way allowed the PMA part system….where parts are no longer required to be manufactured by the OEM for aircraft….and I’ve got plenty of stories about that nonsense…)
So yeah…. I quite happily still fly everywhere around the world….
Yikes.
For a while I hated flying. Freaked me out even though I knew statistically it is a safe form of travel. Then I watched a bunch of Air Disasters shows and realized how many fixes they have put in place and I felt a lot better about flying.
Then I subbed to /r/AviationMaintenance. I really don't want to fly anymore.
The first time I went skydiving, my instructor was a retired aircraft mechanic. He said something along the lines of “People always ask me why I’d want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. I tell them that I worked on planes for 30 years, and there is no such thing as a perfectly good airplane.”
Sounds like my dad, who after working as a computer programmer consultant since the early 70s, has become a Luddite, to the point that he won't even wear a digital watch. I wonder what a railroad engineer would tell your father.
I remember watching an American 60 Minutes episode about commercial airlines buying fake plane parts, maybe 20+ years ago. Depressing to see it still happens.
I remember that one. They also discussed how most large airports had the ability to fully service aircraft and how there were only a few depots such as Texas and hiring skilled illegals as mechanics to service the majority of aircraft to cut costs and take advantage of those workers.
So what happened to the whole "every part is tracked from production to installation and through maintenance checks?"
that's how they figured this out.
if aviation parts were like auto parts, it would be next to impossible to trace which jets had the bogus parts and how long it had been installed
It sounds like it is and that’s how they were able to catch on to this fake parts company.
I think he means, why didn't they catch the first one?
You've tracked them, but that doesn't mean you've followed up at every second of every day to see if the company still exists.
This is the right answer. When we perform maintenance on our aircraft there's a logbook entry that contains very specific details about the part that went in, such as its serial number, but really that's so the insurance company can track down the culprit after the crash. Not many individuals are doing the tracing themselves.
I think there is trust in the system because the part came with all the necessary paperwork and everything checks out. In this case the shady parts company was forging certification documents from other manufacturers. That’s going to be hard to catch no matter how effective the system is.
Non-paywall link for anyone: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/escalating-scandal-grips-airlines-including-190553757.html
What I want to know is what that part was.
TurboEncabulator. The most precise component in the entire evolutionary aeroplane cycle. I would not want a counterfeit.
I shudder to think that a plane could have gotten off the ground with its turbo unencabulated. The horror.
Since nobody have a serious reply, two parts are mentioned in the article, a turbine blade and a turbine nozzle.
Rooting for beverage cart panel.
Fly by night industry indeed.
Boo, paywall. Anyone have a list of the affected airlines?
Tbh better for the consumer to pay for a newspaper than have it run by some billionaire who can afford to run it endlessly free of charge just so he can propagate his world view.
For example, The Washington Post now run owned by Jeff bezos give all the free articles how keeping the billionaire class and cooking the planet is actually a good thing
this is occuring in other industries as well to the point of affecting a lot of stuff surprised there is not more articles pertaining to this
When we looked for the autopilot computer, we just found a small, tired indian man in a compartment
Well that is scary!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It has had two consecutive summers plagued with seemingly constant flight delays and cancellations as “revenge travel” grips a worldwide public eager to get out after a pandemic-era hibernation.
Instead these parts “get sold cheaply to customers who need inexpensive replacements.” Black market dealings can be slightly more nefarious in nature, often entailing sale of military technology to countries that are under international sanctions, such as selling spare F-14 fighter jets to Iran.
In addition to allegedly forging documents for airplane parts it appears that AOG Technics created several fake LinkedIn profiles claiming to be company executives, according to Bloomberg.
Several of the filings are riddled with typos, including misspelled executive titles and oddly capitalized words that appear to have happened when someone hit caps lock instead of the “A” key.
Other documents show a series of shifting corporate addresses, some of which end up back at either a coworking space in London and the offices of a now-retired accountant in a sleepy West Sussex town.
A Certificate of Incorporation filed with the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales in January 2021 listed Kensho’s headquarters at the same London address of AOG Technics—the North Nova building just a few blocks from Buckingham Palace.
The original article contains 1,523 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Oh cool wardogs 2: the enshittification with jonah hill should be dope
Sir, we've discovered that these fuselages that we have been installing for the last 3 months are all made out of paper mache.
CEO: Shit we're going to get sued! Do anything else to tell me?
We opened up a black box and nothing was inside except for Three paper clips and a dead AA battery.
That's a clever scam. The magic is all in the name. AOG stand for Aircraft On Ground. Whenever there is a sefty risk identified, the rules says authorities and the industry must be advised within 24h. When a customer call about an AOG there is no 24h thing must happen right fucking now. Safety issues mean a plane could fall someday maybe, but AOG mean loosing money right now, by the minutes. So if you have a distributor that can send a part that will get the plane off the ground, with a bunch of papers it's getting sold for a high price.
I bought my Technics Direct-drive turntable Model SL-Q20 in 1981 or 1982, still working like a champ.
Well that's great news. Give me 15 minutes and a Xerox, and I'll have that bad boy certified to be installed into the avionics of a 737.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
