I wish for every one of these 'not an accident, but it was scary' stories there was a story about the 30+k deaths that yet again happened on US roads last year and we barely cared. Unfortunately some day there will be another major airline accident because no system is perfect. The stats are clear though, airlines are incredibly safe. We are over reporting these types of issues by orders of magnitude compared to other transportation and safety related issues.
I wonder if there is an (unnamed?) psychological effect at play here. When a large activity has very rare issues compared to its peers maybe we tend to over emphasize the few issues found? Possibly because the difference in rates is too extreme for us to comprehend. Hundreds dying on the roads every day, nobody blinks an eye. One plane does what it is supposed to when a mistake was made and it is a news story.
Imagine if in the constitution there was some line like 'the right to use an airplane shall not be infringed' or something and so any attempt at regulating airplane safety was declared illegal. As a result thousands of people died every year in airplane accidents and everyone was "well that's what the founder fathers wanted, so what are ya gonna do?"
Its incredible how little society cares about road accidents. Its not just the deaths. Also the injuries and the massive amount of property damage and other costs.
Somehow this hasn't been identified as systematic issue and the only solution anybody seems to come up with is 'cars are just gone drive themselves and they are going to be perfect'.
The solution are so simple and low tech, so much incredible low hanging fruit. If only people actually thought about it in those terms.
People just aren't good at understanding risk. If we do it every day we get numb to it.
I actually use cars as a personal risk metric. Most people drive regularly so it is clearly a risk we 'accept' but we also admit it is risky and require training, inspections, vehicle and road standards, dedicated police/fire/ambulance/etc etc etc. Basically, driving is my cut-line. If I am doing an activity that is statistically as dangerous/near the danger of driving I will consider extra precautions or consider avoiding it all together. If it is less dangerous I generally just accept the default safety included with the activity. If it is more dangerous I seriously consider not doing it.
It contains a huge ton of boring not that dangerous highway miles. Highways are a separated environment that solves most of the issue with US infrastructure planning.
Second, this also doesn't take into account speed reduction because of concession. So basically, the infrastructure is terrible designed but because there is just to many cars, that often masks the potential issues.
Third, this also doesn't take into account the effect, that this was partly achieved by simply removing pedestrians. The US has way less walking.
If you talk a more narrow look situation where there is mixed use of space, the US comes of much worse.
Also this ends before the pandemic, the pandemic partly showed what US infrastructure leads to when your remove some of the congestion.
This stat also doesn't show things like property damage, its funny how much car driving into buildings is a thing in US media.
But the US traffic death rate is more than double the average rate in other industrialized countries. There’s probably a point at which we can’t improve these rates given the cars we drive and the way we design streets and the lack of alternatives to driving, generally.
Yeah! I am -very- glad to see this trend. I am guilty of posting deaths per year when other normalized stats are far better. Thanks for pointing that out.
Regular people being familiar with it has an effect, but most people don't actually influence the relevant regulations. Personally, I generally avoid driving whenever possible but I live in a city in Switerland it very easy for me. And of course driving here is safer.
The plane manufactures are a small group of companies and a slightly larger group of airlines, but even there, its basically a small group of major airlines. Most safety related things can be regulated federally and regular has the ability to learn from incidents, and then cycle that knowlage into regulation. Each incident is big enough that it contains some learning.
With road safety non of that exists. You have countless 'small' accidents, and non directly influence regulations. You then have an agency looking at car safety, but they don't look at safety holistically, they car about the people in the car during an accidents, and not much beyond. There is in theory somebody responsible for designing safe infrastructure, but infrastructure standards evolve very slowly and not primarily because of safety. And lets be real, many of those standards haven't been updated since the 60s. There is basically no feedback cycle that connects road safety and road infrastructure. Then there are other people who are responsible for rules about drinking, seat belts and so on.
There are plenty of roads where multiple people died in virtually the same place. But there simply is no feedback mechanism.
Luckily 'some' forward thinking regulators in Europe have adopted a more areospace like system. Each accidents has learning, each on creates a number of short term recommendations, and longer term recommendations. The short terms ones are actually done. And the long term recommendation are planned for the next overhaul. Other similar places are identified and potentially also upgraded. And then you also take the learning's from those accidents that directly influences the next edition of the infrastructure standard that are regularly updated.
Not all societies care so little, in the Nordics, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. there has been a constant effort through the last decades to make roads safer.
Norway (and I believe Sweden as well) have their own programs aiming for zero road fatalities, it's a dream but there's an aim and concerted effort has made traffic accidents less fatal to all road participants (pedestrians, bikes, and drivers).
The technical solutions are low tech: slower speed limits for traffic in denser populated areas, removing space for cars in cities to make drivers more attentive, roundabouts instead of crossings. The issue for the USA is the willingness of the average Joe driving their car to have their privileges taken away, that's not a technical issue but a political/social one.
Check out my other comment in response. I did wrote a lot on that.
> The issue for the USA is the willingness of the average Joe driving their car to have their privileges taken away, that's not a technical issue but a political/social one.
That isn't really true. Many of the changes don't actually take away any privileges. In fact, many of those changes can be done improving both safety and threwput.
Most people don't really have input. There are road design standards, and US engineers mostly just implement by the standard. Those standard could and should be changed.
Yes there is a deep political issue to really improve everything. But there is a absolutely huge amount of low hanging fruit that would be massively better. And in fact, people in the US, like people everywhere else do actually generally support changes that improve safety.
There is just a totally dysfunctional and broken engineering culture supported by a completely incompetent government.
I truly believe its not individual people and their privilege driving this.
Once you get past much of the easy changes, there might be things that cause some pushback, but a lot of it doesn't.
Look at the backlash the change to maximum speed limits in NYC has gotten, even here on HN where people should be a bit more well educated than the average. Every single change to roads that drivers perceive as detrimental will be met with huge backlash, even in the cases where it will help throughput.
Drivers do not care about throughput, they care about what they perceive will benefit themselves to make their journeys in a shorter time. Lowering speed limits doesn't give them that impression (but it does increase safety and throughput), reducing car lanes to make space for exclusive bus lanes has the same effect, shared modality streets (like trams + busses + cars) also help to increase throughput but drivers don't see that way, they only think they will be slowed down by the other traffic.
It's a big political change, the car-centric culture of the USA does not allow for much progress in this since it will require a multi-decade concerted effort to actually tackle the problem. If a mayor changes the standards for roads (or governor, or whomever is responsible for it) there will be backlash and a potential political weapon to run against them next election, the next incumbent will have to deliver on the promise of giving cars more space since a reduction for just 2-4 years will create issues that require many other infrastructure projects to compensate for, and you end up at the same spot after a few cycles of this.
It's not rational, it's dysfunctional, but it's the culture that the USA created, to change it will require a lot of political capital to be burnt and many administrations in a row implementing projects that move the needle of this culture to something else.
As I pointed out, I was not suggesting changes like changing car lanes to bus lanes.
And the 'lets just change top level highly visible regulation' without actually addressing the underlying infrastructure are what I am talking about.
> Drivers do not care about throughput
There are places where they removed red lights and put stop signs. People complained. Then the reversed it, guess what, people complained even more so they revered it again.
People don't know what they want, they will simply complain about changes if you actually ask them.
So, the solution just do systematic infrastructure changes bit by bit, without any grand top level political retric. Instead of top level 'all speed limits are now different' you go road by road, reducing it where it makes the most sense with the least amount of resistance. If anybody complains, just reverse it. This intersection is no longer with a red light. That's much harder to organize against. Most places will not organize a political revolution because one local intersection is different, and then 1 year later another one, and so on.
Again there is so much low hanging fruit. Like putting red lights on the sides, where pedestrians are rather then on top. There is not gone be a political movement against that, but it improves safety for pedestrians quite a bit.
In places where you have cycling gutters, and parking you can swap them, moving cycling inside the parking. Again, no removing car lanes.
You can turn 4-lane roads into a 3-lane with turn lane. Same threwput. You can even claim you are doing this to increase the amount of parking. They managed to do this even in Oklahoma maybe the most unsafe and pro car city in the US.
You can narrow lanes and turn parallel parking into angled parking, again this isn't an 'anti-car' move. More parking, and no more parallel parking. What a win for car owners.
The list goes on, those are low hanging fruit that not gone cause a political revolution.
Again, my point here is that even if you are pro-car, US is terrible in both safety, threwput and cost. Even by their own currently existing requirements they are doing a terrible job. Often there isn't a need to even change any political rules, simply the road department has to do a better job.
> multi-decade concerted effort to actually tackle the problem.
You can do much of that by slightly changing the standards and doing it bit by bit when re-stripping roads and doing other work.
If you want to change the big stuff, yes, that's going to be more political.
> Also the injuries and the massive amount of property damage and other costs.
I'd put the well documented, utterly massive cost to health and wellness, short and long term, due to pollution, up there too. Pretty much every single case of asthema for a start.
The way the world works: dismiss enormous numbers of deaths when they're unknown, nameless, individual, low status people, or happen to Rwandans or Palestinians in distant lands and not pretty children of celebrities.
How many more close calls will it take for us to significantly overhaul the ATC system and bring it into the present century? Or is a large scale disaster the only way to make people understand the urgency?
Two planes collided in LAX in 1991 due to what was clearly a controller error, killing 35. Investigators decided that anyone could have made such a mistake given circumstances. The controller wasn't punished, and instead a bunch of changes were made to prevent similar situations in the future.
Obviously it would be ideal if such changes are made before planes collide, but the US air accident investigation system generally does its job, as far as I've heard.
> But The Times found that the combination of six-day workweeks and round-the-clock schedules has caused controllers to develop physical and mental health problems. Many avoid seeking professional help because doing so might jeopardize the medical clearances they need to work.
This is happening frequently to pilots and cabin crew as well, all over the world. Regulators have allowed a lot of flex in rostering in recent years, maybe a bit too much.
It's really crazy that ATC isn't 99% computerized. It's exactly the kind of problem which is trivial for a computer program with all the necessary information, but incredibly stressful for a human.
I'd argue against the triviality, but even if we accept that premise, the exact challenge is "with all the necessary information".
Human ATC operators integrate a huge variety of information including voice comms to build a situational awareness of not just the current position and velocities of planes, but also their stated intentions.
Yes, with sufficient coordination you could push all of that over into the cockpit and have the pilots input their intentions directly. We all know that voice transcription is a bit hit and miss (though the phraselogy used would probably be quite helpful), and certainly typing is... not optimal for emergencies.
This aligns with basically all questions about automation in aviation (including in the cockpit). Automated systems can generally out perform human operators in probably the 99.99+% of typical cases. However a human with full situational awareness is still critical in the remaining situations. The challenge is that:
* For a human to have proper awareness, they must be meaningfully engaged. They must actually be having some real agency and effect on the system.
* Neither full human nor full automation provides the degree of safety and performance that we currently desire. Somehow we must integrate the two systems together.
In this case, planes coming from 04R (per the article) were crossing 04L. All the normal crossings of 04L I see in this PDF are equipped with the lights.
The same reason why ACH transfers still happen by transferring large files to a FTP server once a day or why San Francisco's train routing system still uses 5.25-inch floppy disks or why social security payments are calculated by a system running COBOL. It has always worked this way, and there's no political will or public pressure to change it.
I'm a big fan of overhauling the system for a lot of reasons, but safety isn't one of them. 'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident. Rebuilding the system because you think it is dangerous will likely lead to a less safe system since the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it.
However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind.
> 'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident.
It's a giant red flag in any serious OSHA system in resource mining, energy extraction, military logistics, etc.
In order to reduce fatal accidents close attention is paid to the full incident pyramid, minor accidents and near misses.
Fiftty years of practice about the globe strongly makes the case that a reduction in near misses and non fatal incidents has a real flow on to reducing fatal accidents.
> the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it.
Achieved via exactly the kind of OSHA attention to small details and near misses system just outlined.
The safety officers at New York and elsewhere will be failing at their job if they are not putting some the hours in to looking at this incident and how to mitigate future occurrences .. especially when visibility is lower than on this day.
I agree with all your points. My discussion points were about the original comment about the need to 'overhaul' the system. Right now I bet there is an investigation going on into this incident and it will likely lead to appropriate changes. I also suspect that many different entities have just upped their trackers of incidents to collect exactly the trend data that can prevent future issues, just like they should be doing. In other words the current system doesn't need a safety overhaul because it is doing everything reasonable and doing it well and has the stats to back up that it is doing reasonable things.
Arguing that the system is safe and doesn't need an overhaul is not the same thing as arguing that the system should start ignoring things.
iterative change is a part of the system, self reflection and pivoting to address issues as they first appear to avoid future consequences is very much how these things should work.
We've had too many runway incursions throughout US aviation, and efforts to reduce them with minor iterations to process have not been successful. It may be time to think about more major changes.
> 'Close call' without 'accident' still means there wasn't an accident.
Close calls are a very important signal for how safe the system is.
Good safety systems are redundant and require many failures to result in a crash. Here, we got down to the last link in the chain: weather was clear and the departing pilots could see there was an obvious problem while there was time to stop.
> since the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it.
We've gotten to this safe system by chipping away at problems we see-- both from actual accidents and close calls. The only way we reach and keep (and perhaps surpass) this level of safety is to keep (carefully) correcting problems.
(And yes, there is risk of changes making things worse. We need to do our best to avoid that and detect it quickly if it happens).
> However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind.
Until cars can drive themselves without crashing into stopped fire trucks[1], I don’t want anything autonomous flying anywhere near where I live.
People do that a lot too. Over 40k people died on the roads in 2022. Maybe we could save some of them if we went autonomous. The better decision point is about overall safety, not one-off incidents. In aviation, like driving, the #1 source of accidents is human error.
How much actually went wrong here? Forgive me, genuine question.
Afaict from my armchair as a computer scientist, at least some level of operational safeguards worked to cover what I guess is an edge case (multiple controllers racing against each other allowing multiple planes onto / crossing a runway at the same time)? One of them saw traffic on the runway and then proceeded to make a 6 minute detour instead of blindly hitting it. Maybe this is still safe enough and is worth it vs having everything be slower the rest of the time forcing all the controllers to wrap commands in a semaphore or mutex, so to speak.
Curious if there are any metrics anywhere of how often these types of mistakes happen. It sounds very serious and it would be nice to have an authoritative answer on whether they are indeed increasing and/or whether it's particular (as commenters suggest) to any particular airports.
Exactly. Without any sort of baseline measure of what is typical in any given year, this could be interpreted as either a sensationalized cherry picking of the usual rate of problems, or a major deviation from normal.
What's the definitive data source that I can use to tell if these incidents really are becoming more common, or if they're all just bubbling up in a more visible way because of the repeated drama about Boeing? I'm expressing genuine curiosity here, because if they are indeed becoming more common you can start asking interesting questions using the data. More common since when, or what's the cutoff? What kind of incidents are happening more? Is there a common theme between airports? Between Air Traffic controllers? And so on.
I wonder if there is an (unnamed?) psychological effect at play here. When a large activity has very rare issues compared to its peers maybe we tend to over emphasize the few issues found? Possibly because the difference in rates is too extreme for us to comprehend. Hundreds dying on the roads every day, nobody blinks an eye. One plane does what it is supposed to when a mistake was made and it is a news story.