I was in HKG last week and noted quite a few 747s still in operation as cargo planes, but aren’t they super old by aviation standards? I was surprised to see 747s at all!
They’re kept alive because of their reputation probably
I do not wish to downplay this tragedy, but stories like this always wake me to the fact of commercial aviation safety. 100,000+ commercial flights globally, per day, and if a single person dies or there’s any sort of wreck, it’s world news. It’s fun to bag on Boeing, and they have indeed fucked up, but still, the odds of dying on one of their planes is infinitesimal.
Now take automobile deaths. (And I can only speak about America.) ~45-50K annually, same as gun deaths. (CDC stats if you want a more in-depth peak.) People are afraid of being shot, but if you’re not a suicide (~48%), or in a gang or run with violent people (or family), your odds of getting shot are damned slim. Contrasted with vehicular deaths, well, one is mostly random or self-inflicted, the other is not.
Just for giggles, Gemini spits out: The average person’s chance of dying on any given day is very small, approximately 1 in 86,000 for the average U.S. person. Seems fair enough, if you count every human and every death by average lifespan.
If you play D&D, that’s a tough dice roll!
Anyway, this is a rant about how our brains didn’t evolve to calculate risk in a modern, complex world. Apologies, too many beers and this sort of thing is often on my mind.
Won’t waste your screen space, but here’s my favorite quote on the topic:
From Echopraxia, a novel by Dr. Peter Watts
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
100,000 flights per day???
Another boeing bites the… *sea.
Two airport ground staff fell into the sea and died, but everyone on the plane was safe? That’s strange
They were in a vehicle struck by the aircraft.
Was the plane’s name Moana?
That’s a really shitty place to put an ocean.
