Airline and airplane safety

Technology
41

I think Unions and Industry Safety are kind of orthogonal here. Unions contribute to the industry safety of the employees, but I don’t think they inherently contribute to the safety of the customers.

Of course, this matters in the particular industry and role. A pilots’ union arguing for reasonable rest periods between flights certainly contributes to safety of both the pilots and the passengers. Nurses’ unions arguing for certain minimum staffing numbers and shift hour limits would also contribute to improving patient safety. However, steel workers’ unions arguing for improved safety rails above vats of molten steel probably doesn’t do anything to improve the safety of the people who use said steel, while it absolutely improves the safety of those who produce it.

Edit: Also, the airline industry is extremely heavily regulated for safety, even if you figure in regulatory screw-ups like the Boeing 737 MAX fiasco. Outside of union contracts, there are already tons of regulations related to pilot hours, maintenance paperwork, and so on, designed to protect passenger safety. In this particular case, I think the unions probably have little impact on passenger safety because government regulators already have all of that covered. Not that unions don’t have a place with respect to the industry – just that its place is probably almost entirely geared towards guaranteeing fair employee compensation and workplace safety, which I wholeheartedly support.

42

There’s got to already be evacuation procedures for those with disabilities but I’m also pretty sure in all practical terms, if you’re waiting for a wheelchair, no-one but a few good souls who might try and carry you to the slide should be waiting for you to get out.

43

Leave your fucking bags or else. I’m absolutely of the opinion that physical force is more than justified if necessary, and legally, it’s also acceptable as far as I know.

Yes. And while I can’t call it a fault - it’s a fucked up, chaotic situation - I also put some of it on the crew for not maintaining control of the cabin. And regardless of if it’s a normal landing or a crash, it’s still their cabin until the last crew member is out the door/window/gaping hole in the side. And yeah, it really is kinda inevitable that people do dumb shit like that when things go down, and frankly, it’s impossible to tell who’s who till shit is going down. It’s such an inevitability that when an airframe is getting an evacuation cert, they even introduce artificial blockages like that, by paying some of the passengers a bonus if they get their bag off the plane during the simulated evacuation.

Should airlines implement some kind of safety change like locking overhead bins during an emergency?

Not happening. Aside from the safety concerns(there’s some emergency equipment in those lockers, and the risk of it not being accessible due to a malfunction is unacceptable), it assumes that people are gonna try it, find it’s locked, and then move on. They don’t - they’re in a panic, and acting real dumb already, you think they’re not gonna just keep trying to bust or yank open that locked overhead, and cause an obstruction anyway? It’s genuinely better that they’re able to bust it open and get their bag, then move, than have some idiot have to be physically moved away because they won’t stop trying to open the overhead. Hell, I’ve seen people not in a panic, just trying to board, furiously trying to yank open non-operational fake overheads that are actually covers for the emergency exit from an overhead crew rest, literally until someone comes over and tells them that they can’t use that overhead.

Should regulations be changed to prosecute people who materially impede evacuation by taking items that leads to deaths, with something like manslaughter charges?

Not a lawyer or legal expert, but I expect that one would be hard to float. How do you prove their actions directly lead to a death? How do you prove they slowed people down by a significant degree, enough so to satisfy a court? How do you split the culpability between their doing that, and the people whose primary job is to get them off the plane and stop them from doing dumb shit like that? And then how do you split that culpability between the crew members and the purser? Too many questions I simply can’t answer to say it’s a good solution.

2 Likes
44

IIRC from my days as a ramp worker, the accessible areas of most aircraft are literally right in front of the door in order to get people with disabilities out quickly. But now I see @Churba typing and this is their area of expertise so I’ll concede the floor.

45

Asynchronous communication my friend, no floor to be ceded, short of just waiting to see what someone posts before saying anything. I’d love to hear your take on the situation.

46

Well on JetBlue, on the A320s anyway, the spots for securing a passenger wheelchair were at the very front of the cabin just behind the front hatch on the starboard side. Besides the obvious easing of embark/debark, I learned from flight attendants that they are trained to if possible get those people out of the plane first, and that part of that logic beyond helping the most vulnerable first is to get the wheelchair the hell out of the plane so there’s room to maneuver near the hatch.

47

For that example, yes, it only helps the steelworkers. Steelworkers are a great example of helping the industry, even outside of union jobs, by forcing competition that employees non-union workers to keep up with the same standards of work-sites that have union workers. By forcing union work-sites to have better wages, benefits, and safety they may non-union work-sites to do the same to keep up. Additionally, unions are typically big supports of legislation that makes their industry as a whole safer. They do have less of an impact on the consumer side of steel but even those jobs are helped by union workers in the sectors that use the steel, such as construction, manufacturing, et cetera.

48

While policy and positioning varies(For example, one of the airlines I worked for positions them differently, a little bit further away from the exits, so to keep some able-bodied passengers close to the exits as possible, just in case), but it’s broadly correct.

49

Oh, I completely agree that construction, manufacturing, etc., workers are helped by the existence of steel workers’ unions. Or that unions in general help industries as a whole in order to try to help keep fair employee treatment across the industry and multiple industries.

But yeah, as far as how any of them help any of the consumer side of the industry, it certainly varies based on the individual industry and roles of the union members. The only unions I can think of offhand where improving their safety and work conditions would also end up improving the safety of their customers are transportation (specifically vehicular operators and possibly maintainers) and health care. But these are the only unionized industries I can think of where the employees work very closely with consumers and/or the general public (think of a truck driver on a public road, for instance – you wouldn’t want them to be driving after going 24 hours without sleep).

50

I think about the baggage question a lot, same with evacuating a building. (Consequence of living in a building with people who were very irresponsible)

  1. Denial of actual danger / failure to comprehend scope and consequences / relying on default behavior patterns are common responses to emergency situations.
  2. People are shit at split second thinking about things they have never practiced/trained for.
  3. People regularly practice holding onto their stuff.
  4. The loss of certain stuff can really fuck up your shit. Medication, documents, expensive or irreplaceable stuff.

= in a split second decision, your brain is trained to ignore the emergency instructions and get your precious stuff. There should probably be required multi context evacuation drills before penalizing.

Which is why I sort my stuff by priority, so I can grab documents & essential needs without losing time.

51

Idea: Put a mechanism in the plane such that in an evacuation situation, all overhead bins are LOCKED (except the one with the life rafts and shit in it).

52

@Churba already covered this.

53

I think the malfunction is a non-concern. Obviously the one that has the safety equipment in it doesn’t even have a lock on it. Malfunction impossible!

As for the idiot who keeps trying to open it, physical force. It’s going to be necessary no matter what. The idea is to just reduce the need for it as much as possible. But in any panic situation, there’s going to be an idiot making things worse, and the people who know what’s up have to move them out of the way without hesitation.

54

I would physically assault anyone who tried to get their bag, and shove past them with violence if necessary.

2 Likes
55

Drill baby drill :wink:

56

Don’t fuck around with lasers. Also applies to non-airplane safety.

57

What is the point of this? Can you even see if the laser is hitting the plane? Is it like kids throwing rocks at cars, they just do it without thinking because they’re bored?

58

William Langeweische back on the beat:

I didn’t realize how much we had figured out about what happened. And that if the black boxes were recovered somehow, they wouldn’t tell us much we don’t already know.

59

I was reading that article over lunch. Very interesting.

It all sadly makes a lot of sense. And yeah, ultimately the narrative that plays out when one looks at the evidence presented here is easy to imagine.

The importance here is, like all disasters, to understand the ways it happened and how to prevent it in the future. Unfortunately these types of situations are based on trust: there’s little to really do to prevent a human pilot with authority from betraying the trust placed upon them, without introducing far worse issues. Though I won’t discount that procedures or added equipment might at least limit the damage potential.

But there are things to learn still, about how to at least monitor and tract and react to situations like a pilot run amok with a loaded jet.

Main things that we can do in the future will be a fully capable form of autopilot that can override humans if any one of a number of people on the aircraft hits the ‘panic’ button, or if the jet clearly goes outside of the intended bounds of flight. Computer takes control, pilot on the ground gets override to follow along in ‘drone’ mode, etc. Of course this would put the aircraft immediately on the safest and shortest possible flight path to a suitable airfield.

This won’t eliminate accidents, but as a failsafe when the pilot or cockpit is compromised, it will make it far more difficult to take a jet by force when any threat trips a switch that severs command and control from the cockpit.

Worst case scenarios I can think of then is someone tries quickly to put the jet into an unrecoverable maneuver before the computer failsafe reacts and kicks control. Likely it wouldn’t work, but, might give everyone a startle.

The ‘everything went bad but maybe it would make a good screenplay’ scenario is the autopilot just sucks or if there’s some kind of handover of control to designated ground-based remote pilots, that person is actually in league with an angry steward who presses the panic button, so that their boyfriend can crash the jet and try to make it look like lag messed up the landing.

The most likely negative scenario is that we see an article of some angry passenger finding and pressing the panic button so that the jet will land.

60

That was one if the creepiest yet most fascinating things I’ve ever read. The image of some guy flying a jet full of dead bodies until he saw the sunrise one last time then crashing the plane is so… unnerving. I’ve been on four long trans-pacific flights in 777’s so a silent, dimmed cabin full of people slumped over in their seats isn’t hard to imagine.