Reasons for US aviation being very safe?

18 comments

1. >is this because of the FAA?

   I think the real question is, why wouldn’t it be?

2. Yes, it is because of the FAA and NTSB. If your car route was filed beforehand, required to be miles away from other cars, you had a navigator with radar in your ear, and the car was inspected before each time you drove it, driving would probably be pretty safe too

3. I mean, definitely the FAA. I like to assume most other regulatory bodies are similar when flying elsewhere….at least when flying major carrier commercial. 

   >The planes arent that new as well.

   What are you basing this on? 

   For most passenger aircraft, the lifespan is limited by cost effectiveness and number of times pressurizing. Other than that, they last a long time.

4. Comprehensive regulations which are enforced

5. This is a topic I’m pretty deep into.

   It’s a combination of the FAA and the NTSB. After every single aircraft incident (whether it’s an actual crash or if it’s just a near miss) the NTSB conducts an investigation to determine what went wrong and makes recommendations for how to improve safety protocols to prevent similar incidents from happening. They’ll even get involved with investigations of incidents in other countries in coordination with local agencies to both help them reach their findings and to bring knowledge of what caused the incident back to the US. The FAA is then responsible for enforcing those recommendations.

   The system isn’t necessarily perfect, but it has used the past 100 years of various aircraft incidents to create a very robust framework of various safety protocols. Some other countries have similar rigorous standards and so see similar safety records. However, not every country has the same standards and not every country is as rigorous about enforcing standards.

6. Improvements in the engineering of planes; regulation and oversight and training of pilots.

7. >Is it because of FAA?

   Pretty much.

8. Lots of redundancies arerequired in our airplanes. 

   So the assumption is something will fail in your aircraft, that is acceptable and inevitable but you just have to have a backup. 

   The failure could be in the physical device itself or a software algorithm that’s faulty. 

   So Physical devices are redundant, for instance the flight control computer has four separate computers and each computer has two processors checking each other. All four compare the results and if one disagrees it is disabled. 

   For algorithms in a flight control computer one computer might use a countup counter and the other one might use a countdown counter to time a certain event. The idea is you have different algorithms doing the same thing. So you won’t have one faulty algorithm taking out all four computers.  

   Likewise if you have four computers you would use four different CPUs so a CPU error would not take out the other three computers.

9. There’s a sub called r/admiralcloudberg run by a user of the same name that analyzes plane crashes in depth. It’s fascinating and reading reports from around the world gives great insight into your question.

10. People like to rag on the US Government as being incompetent. It’s basically right up there with apple pie and baseball.

    But, most parts of the US Government are the absolute best in the world at what they do, especially safety regulators.

    When the 737 MAX was grounded the first time it was basically a national embarrassment (at least for the aviation industry) that it took so long to issue the grounding order. Usually the FAA is way too cautious.

    We saw that recently with the door plug. Two bolts were missing, it’s still national news and the FAA is conducting a top to bottom review of Boeing. All of this over two bolts.

    There are a few other industries like this in the US. Power generation and distribution comes to mind. When you remove severe weather related outages, we have some of the most reliable electricity in the world. Even with the weather (eg hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms) we are still very high on the list of reliability globally. The nuclear industry has also *never* had a full meltdown, and in fact has never even killed a civilian. There also have been no major nuclear incidents in North America since 1979. In 2003 a large portion of the Eastern Interconnection lost frequency control due to high demand, which resulted in a blackout from New York to Detroit and Toronto. Both the US and Canadian have increased their oversight of utility companies even more since then, and although we’ve came close a few times (eg Texas 2021) we have never had a near-complete grid collapse in North America since then. Before the 2003 one, the last big grid failure was in 1965.

    Like I said it’s fun meme to say the US Government is completely incompetent, but that’s not even remotely true. Especially for agencies like the Department of Transportation and Department of Energy. In some ways they are victims of their own success. The industries and infrastructure they oversee and operate are so reliable and safe that when something does go wrong it’s major national news.

11. Competition. Plane crashes have a high chance of bankrupting a carrier so they don’t fuck around with safety.

12. The FAA, NTSB are huge reasons. But so is the DOT.

    We have also implemented so much new technology to test and inspect planes in the last 30 years, and even the tiniest flaw is handled quickly. There also seems to be a penchant for not keeping planes around if they are too old, except for specific reasons (looking at Alaska, and Northern Canada), so that also contributes, usually, to safety.

    Finally, a huge percentage of our pilots and mechanics are ex-military. As a result, the pilots have a lot of experience getting out of problems. And we have mechanics that have no problem getting in the face of civilian bosses when they want to do something stupid and dangerous.

13. High maintenance standards are placed on the airlines. American pilots typically have more experience than their counterparts other than being on par with Europe. Most airline pilots in America are former military aviators. So they may have transitioned to the 777 coming from an F-18.

    Minimum flight hour requirements to captain are significantly higher in America than most of the world.

    Aircraft operated by airlines in America are on average newer than the rest of the world.

14. The real answer is that a lot of kinks got worked out from the start of commercial aviation until about 2009. There was almost 80 years of trial and error. Better systems, engineering, management practices, corporate structures and synergies were put into place after decades of learning tough lessons. The NTSB and FAA do a fantastic job of looking at past safety flaws and rectifying them via law and policy. I fly at least twice a month for work and I’m pretty confident in the government’s ability to work in concert with private enterprise to keep everyone safe.

15. The US requires pilots to have *much* more training than other countries do. This is also one of the reasons why Airbus aircraft are more popular elsewhere, because they’re like flying on easy mode.

16. “Socialism”

17. Areospace has some of the strictest if not the most strict regulations in the country. They do not accept anything deemed “good enough” which is why the Boeing fiacso is such a big deal.

18. Good regulation