> UPDATE [12:37]: Tuoi Tre, a leading daily in Vietnam, reports that the Vietnamese Navy has confirmed the plane crashed into the ocean. According to Navy Admiral Ngo Van Phat, Commander of the Region 5, military radar recorded that the plane crashed into the sea at a location 153 miles South of Phu Quoc island.
Well that is good to know, the Air France jet took a long time to find because there was no radar information about where it went down. Large jets actually crashing feels very jarring these days to me, whereas 20 years ago it seemed much more common of an occurrence. Could just be a form of survivor bias though.
Yes I do, and I lost a good friend to a plane accident. We knew they were likely gone and that was painful and sad, but the lack of closure until we knew what had happened was even worse. I hope you never have to experience that lack of knowing, wondering if there was anything could have been done, wondering who to be mad at, wondering how something so tragic could happen to someone for no reason.
Having any information about their last minutes, where they might be, is a "good thing" relative to the over all "bad thing" that happened.
Maybe it's late, but ChuckMcM didn't say anything that strikes me as degrading or otherwise disregarding the plight of those who died in today's accident. I suspect you may have misread; if so, that's perfectly fine--events like this strike at the very heart of our society in this connected world, and it's reasonable to express emotions to such an effect.
I just want to remind you that the observation he made was simply a matter of pointing out that, as aircraft safety records have improved, the accidents that do happen seem so startling because of their rarity. And really, it's quite true. Modern aircraft are technological marvels, and it's difficult to think of one simply falling out of the sky. Granted, structural failure, controlled flight into terrain, loss of instruments or instrumentation (as in AF447 where instruments were deprived of important information due to icing), disoriented pilots, and any number of other things conspiring against what is otherwise a very safe method of travel. Hence the shock.
The reality of the situation is well captured by kunai's comment. We can only learn to further improve the airline industry through such accidents. It's a tragedy of limitation and of our inability to see into the future.
But, when you stop to think about it, what better way to honor the dead than to make sure whatever accident claimed their lives never happens again? That's why this is important.
That's one sad thing about aircraft. It's very complex. Thousands of screws and if one goes missing the aircraft could fall apart at critical moment. I know someone who works as aircraft technician and he describes his job extremely challenging. For example, a pilot said he believed the airplane was hit by lightning but the engineers couldn't locate any lightning mark. Could they risk the chance? Spent an extra 15 minutes and they still couldn't find any. Till this day neither the pilot nor any engineer could confirm that a lightning hit the aircraft that day.
Every time I go on an airplane I would pray to get back on the ground safely. Everyone feels the fear when the airplane starts shaking or descending rapidly. Despite all the safety and escape plans, if an aircraft is doomed to crash/break apart/blow up, the chance of staying alive is so slim. And people on the airplane know they are about to die and that fear could last from a few seconds to a whole minute. That's a horrible way to die! I mean if you were on a bus and crashed on the high way, that's probably a few seconds. If you are lucky you could jump off the bus before the impact.
This might be off topic, but this is also the exact reason why terrorists like to hijack airplane (I don't want to raise a holy war on airport security here, just let me finish my thoughts here, please!). And you are right, we have to learn through accidents and that's unfortunate. We do that all the time. I count myself a lucky one because I am still alive. I hope I don't become the next victim. I hope this will not happen again.
> Thousands of screws and if one goes missing the aircraft could fall apart at critical moment
This is not true. Sometimes aircraft have mechanical problems - pitot tubes icing over, for example. There
An aircraft is severely over engineered for its job. Commercial aircraft have landed with gaping holes in the fuselages, engines on fire, landing gear stuck shut. There are very, very few parts of the plane that are single points of failure.
Some people are understandably nervous flyers. People do get scared when an aircraft starts shaking, and that's natural, but what you should remember is that the aircraft is designed to shake. Pilot error is a far more common cause of accidents than mechanical failure.
Remember, you're far, far more likely to be injured or killed driving a car than taking a plane. It's one of - if not the - safest form of transport out there.
This plane took off with 30 screws missing. But if it was under critical moment (extreme weather or mechanical failure), going with 30 screws could have a chain impact and eventually lead to a fatal crash.
This is another lucky incident at 1000 feet. Imagine this at critical moment and at 20k, 30k altitude! I would suppose some passengers would die if that happened.
Remember, you're far, far more likely to be injured or killed driving a car than taking a plane. It's one of - if not the - safest form of transport out there.
I think that's up to argument and depends on how one look at the issue. Is plan safer? There are more corners, more cars, more trains than aircraft combined at any given time. And the most important thing to consider is getting help. I have to press hard on this: if you are in the air, the chance of you surviving is low. Even on the ground after a serious car accident at a reasonable location, most patients could receive proper medical treatment within minutes. But when you are in the air? In the case of gunman I could try to escape on the ground but not really in the air.
>There are more corners, more cars, more trains than aircraft combined at any given time. And the most important thing to consider is getting help. I have to press hard on this: if you are in the air, the chance of you surviving is low. Even on the ground after a serious car accident at a reasonable location, most patients could receive proper medical treatment within minutes.
You get it man. I've always found that statistical comparison with car accidents very lame and misguided. The sheer feeling of helplessness when you are in a plane, and think something is seriously wrong.
Read both your comments. My thoughts are very similar to yours in this matter. I am very afraid to fly. But of course its not always avoidable.
Due respect to the "technological marvels", but some times I wonder, why can't planes be designed in a way, that they are safe even if they fall. I have no freaking idea, how this can be done. Just a wish.
> You get it man. I've always found that statistical comparison with car accidents very lame and misguided. The sheer feeling of helplessness when you are in a plane, and think something is seriously wrong.
No, you both don't get it. It's not debatable.
Lets start with the numbers in [1]. There is says that ~25% of the plane crashes are fatal. Also, since 1997 there's been no more than "1 [death] for every 2,000,000,000 person-miles". So let's (incorrectly) assume that all accidents were fatal, so the rate would be no more than 4 deaths for every 2billion miles/person, or 2 deaths per 1billion miles/person.
Now we look at [2] for car fatalities. Let's use the USA numbers: 8.5 deaths per 1 billion vehicle kms. This works out to 5.2 deaths per billion vehicle kms. A quick google search indicates that the average vehicle occupancy in the US is ~1.6 [3]. This turns our figure to 3.25 deaths per billion miles/person.
That is, even if we assume that all airplane accidents are fatal and we only count casualties from road accidents (completely disregarding the much higher number of injuries), it is roughly 50% riskier to use a car than a plane.
What we have been arguing is the likelihood to survive when an accident has occurred.
Compare the followings:
1. Heart attack during flying vs during walking/on a bus/on a train
2. Airplane crashes into ocean vs drunk drive crashed into another car on highway
3. Gunman hijack airplane vs gunman hijack a Starbuck
In every case, ground accidents are more likely to receive assistance than flying accidents, logically.
If we equip vehicles with auto-pilot system, will that make driving safer?
Living in the space is quite safe as long as nothing goes wrong. But in a zero-gravity environment, middle of nowhere, far away from Earth, living in the space is still more dangerous than living next to the most active volcano today. Why? Because you could relocate (if it's a sudden eruption, fine...). Yet given enough time and with a warning, one could escape from the island on their own or with helps before the eruption.
In my previous post's numbers, I counted all airplane accidents as fatal. That is, I set the likelihood of surviving a plane accident to 0. I only used the death numbers from car accidents though, so the likelihood of dying in a car accident is the actual likelihood as observed in the past.
The number of cars and number of planes does not matter in the above calculation, because the numbers are normalized to miles/person. More planes in the air is not likely to increase those normalized numbers by any significant measure.
Now, (1) is a fair point and I must concede on that. (2) is already accounted within the numbers above. (3)'s casualties are also counted in the plane case, but not in the Starbucks case, so this actually detracts from your point.
Auto-piloted vehicles would be a huge safety measure in a not-so-distant future. However, there are lots of ethical/political issues that we need to overcome to require people to use their autopilots (e.g. who is liable when the autopilot screws up?)
The living-in-space comparison is way out of line. On the one hand, you don't fly to work: you fly occasionally when you need to do long distance travels. If you foresee any problems (you are sick, have heart problems, whatever) you just don't fly. On the other hand, your safest bet would be to not travel at all, yet you take the risk because you gain something from it. Now, if you decide that you do want to travel from the west to the east coast, the risk is simply lower if you do it by plane than by car. At least that's what the numbers say...
You are keeping on arguing and deviating. That guy just wanted to compare the feelings in two situations:
- Car is running at 80kmph on empty road and the engine stops working - the drivers waits for it to slow down and parks on the side somewhere and calls 911 (or some other number)
- Plane is flying at 10K feet level and engines stop working. Pilot takes his son's photo from his front pocket and has a close (probably last) look and then maybe starts praying if he is a believer.
Numbers, numbers, facts, facts. If these were to tell us how we should feel in a certain scenario there wouldn't be any branch of philosophy, psychology and all those shit.
It's a simple what-if: What if a plain stops working at high altitude and what if a car stops working at high speed. In case of a plane you brake, turn, up, down, stop - you are done.
Dude, planes can explode in the air because their windows are the wrong shape. That lesson got learned the hard way. Engines can fall off because of damaged mountings. Engine turbine disks can explode and take all control systems with them. Gears can jam and elevators stuck causing planes to nosedive.
You are talking about a highly pressurized canister of air travelling at the better part of the speed of sound way up in the sky, and it must be made as light as possible. It's a marvel they are as safe as they are.
> Remember, you're far, far more likely to be injured or killed driving a car than taking a plane. It's one of - if not the - safest form of transport out there.
Right, and this is an indication of how safe one can make things even given inherent risks in the technology. It's worth remembering how much we devote to this task. And there are plenty of near-misses that are just mind-boggling, like BA-9, for example, where the 747 flew through the ash cloud of a volcano and lost all four engines as well as rendered its windshield more or less opaque. And yet they still landed safely.
Aircraft are amazingly safe as they currently are. However structurally, there isn't a lot of room for redundency.
I think you're absolutely right on the emotional front. And it's curious in a sense, because I think it's partially our "technology bias." We see aircraft as these complex machines, almost like black boxes in a sense: People in, plane up, plane down, people out. In spite of the aircraft having existed in parallel with much of modern society, we still see them as a pinnacle of human achievement (ignoring international space programs for a moment). Which is probably why the disaster of such a beast crashing seems so jarring, in spite of it happening so infrequently.
Of course, if you're lucky enough to survive the impact when one does crash, the smoke and fire from burning fuel is usually what kills...
I'm sure he does, but knowing what happened and where it went down (for the main purpose of locating the CVR and FDR) is critical to help prevent things like this from happening in the future.
It sounds very grim, but we learn from our mistakes. Although blunders in mission-critical situations like aviations can cause loss of life, we save many more by learning about what happens in scenarios which we aren't prepared for. With AF447, we had to wait years for the investigation. It's likely this one will start faster.
My condolences to the families of everyone involved. It's a sad day for aviation – the first fatalites of the 777's spotless record – and a much, much more solemn one for everyone onboard. May they rest in peace.
Does anyone know if there's a possibility for survivors? Could a highly skilled pilot glide the plane to a safe crash landing on the water given ideal conditions for an engine failure (assuming thats what happened)? Or does a crash landing over the ocean basically mean the worst? My thoughts and prayers go out to those involved.
It's a very different scenario, I know, but when Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 crashed into the ocean because it ran out of fuel during a hijacking, 50 out of a total of 163 people survived.
Of course that crashed happened close to shore and rescues started quite quickly.
> Does anyone know if there's a possibility for survivors?
I doubt it. No emergency transponder recorded. No mayday heard. It was at night. This suggests one of two things to my mind:
1. catastrophic failure with no real time to adjust, like an inflight breakup, or
2. A lack of knowledge that the flight was flying into the ocean (AF447 comes to mind there but there are other cases).
Ditching a commercial aircraft in the ocean is not easy. It's going to be rediculously difficult at night, and right now there is no indication that the pilot was even trying to go for an emergency landing.
I wish I could be hopeful, but it really doesn't look good.
The aviation website Leeham news has posted a list of the standard possible causes that will be investigated in an incident of this nature. They stress that these are not specific to this case, but include:
• Catastrophic structural failure
• Dual engine flame-out
• Clear air turbulence
• Human intervention, such as penetration of the cockpit or a bomb
Seems unlikely to me. There's not a lot of tensions around that and shooting down a flight at 35000 ft would pretty much require a nation to be behind it.
http://my.news.yahoo.com/mas-aircraft-goes-missing--says-air...