‘Less Demanding Than Avoiding Them on the Road’
James Fallows with some interesting comparative thoughts on air crashes, and ground crashes, vis a vis this weekend’s events:
To someone with no experience controlling cars or trucks, it would seem incredible that drivers could whiz past each other in opposite directions on a two-lane road and not have head-on collisions all the time. They’re so close to each other! How can it possibly be safe? Isn’t anyone in control? And in fact, tens of thousands of people do die in road crashes each year. But since most people know about cars, they understand how drivers can watch out for other vehicles, how two-way traffic can usually be safe, and what kind of mistake, misjudgment, recklessness, or sheer bad luck can lead to a head-on crash.
But when it comes to aviation, relatively few people have first-hand experience steering planes or watching out for other aerial traffic. And because air disasters, when they happen, are so gruesome, it’s natural for most people to think: they’re so close to each other! How can it possibly be safe? Isn’t anyone in control? In fact, avoiding collisions in the air is, in terms of sheer reflexes required, less demanding than avoiding them on the road. (Landing an airplane is more demanding than most aspects of driving; simply flying an airplane is not.) If you lose attention for five seconds in a car, you can be in serious trouble. In airplanes there’s usually a lot more time to see what’s coming toward you and decide how to avoid a problem. It’s more like operating a boat in a harbor than like driving a car on a road. This may be why Mayor Michael Bloomberg — who has trained extensively as a helicopter and airplane pilot (his certificate info here) — struck the calmest note in the NYT story. He said, essentially: this is a terrible tragedy, and while we have to look for causes, it doesn’t mean we have to go crazy or shut everything down. More or less the way car drivers respond after a road tragedy.
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This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 8:48 am and is filed under Traffic safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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August 10th, 2009 at 11:11 am
I think this perspective is mostly accurate, but doesn’t bring up the problem of actually seeing traffic while flying. Many times air traffic control has alerted me to aircraft in this or that direction, above or below me, and I’ve simply never been able to spot them. It’s rather like a “Where’s Waldo” moment. The plane is there, somewhere, but where? To mitigate these problems, the FAA has proposed a GPS-based system that relies on planes telling other planes where they are, such that pilots will be able to see traffic on a screen and judge its proximity quickly.
August 11th, 2009 at 2:44 am
I’ve got another example for perceiving all traffic as car drivers. Some time ago here was a big strike of railway drivers. As part of the campaign one of them stopped his train somewhere between two stations and left it. Lots of people complaint how dangerous that has been, probably imagining leaving a car on a driving lane of a highway (particularly here in germany where we still have no regular speed limit on highways).
But if you know a little of railway safety technology you know that this was absolutely safe because not the train driver but the interlocking and its operators are responsible for a free track. As long as a track route is occupied the interlockings will automatically prevent other trains from entering that track route. So the train driver in question only cluttered the schedule which probably made a lot of people angry but was totally safe.
By the way that’s the reason why it is really dangerous to step on a railway track. Drivers are not required to drive on sight because when they can see something on the track it is normally too late to break anyway. Trains have an incredible long stopping distance which is another big difference to street cars.