If all midair collisions were eliminated...

In article ,
John Smith wrote:

The total accident deaths per year in the US is only around 38,000.

Only?

Well, that's on the order of one in 10,000 people per year.
That actually sounds pretty good, considering around 140
people out of 10,000 will die of *some* cause during that
year.

Of course, the context of my comment was that 38,000 isn't much
more than 30,000.

Mike Beede

"Tom De Moor" wrote in message
.be...
In article ,
says...

Speed does not kill, failing or absent infrastructure does.

Infrastructure? Maybe 5% tops.

Try Inattention and intoxication first.




Even to inattention and intoxication infrastructure is the answer.

http://www.katchuptv.com/?video=4781

The video shows what happens if a driver gets knocked inconscious at 250
kph.

What if he gets knocked outconscious?

"Tom De Moor" wrote in message
.be...
In article ,
says...

Even to inattention and intoxication infrastructure is the answer.

Infrastructure cannot compensate for driver incompetence or impairment.



Then you live not in a technical world.

Been in the highway/road building technical world when you were peeing in
diapers.


http://boingboing.net/2010/01/14/cra...1959-chev.html

And you live in a grammar and spelling challenged world, not to mention a
tangential world where you can't keep to the topic.

"John Smith" wrote in message
...
The total accident deaths per year in the US is only around 38,000.

Only?

Okay,. so let's reduce it to zero and ban driving.

Of course, you'd have to ban ALL transportation.

Of course, sitting on your ass watching ESPN and MTV can kill you in the
long run, too.

Lemme guess: college student?

"brian whatcott" wrote in message
...
brian whatcott wrote:

What cost is there in attempting to eliminate midair collisions that
offsets
the loss of life that they entail?

If the US road speed limit were reduced from 70 to 65 mph, perhaps 30,000
lives would be saved annually. Isn't that worthwhile?

We have apparently decided NOT.

Brian W

My numbers for road deaths were way high. The allowable speed would need
to drop much more to provide these life saves - to perhaps as low as 15
mph??
The time series data is much more encouraging: fatalities per million cap
are dropping. One supposes that belts and bags play a role.
Depending on the source, the international data is not flattering
for US drivers - but then - they have long distances available.

I wonder if international road systems are built primarily for
transportation, or for generating revenue from fines and/or deliberately
choked to force people into mass transit like ours.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/reports/rlcreport.asp

http://www.ite.org/

http://www.cato.org/pubs/catosletter...letterv6n1.pdf

In article ,
says...


And you live in a grammar and spelling challenged world, not to mention a
tangential world where you can't keep to the topic.




Sorry: I speak and write but 5 languages. And correct: there are some
spelling errors, most of them due to typing too rapidely or thinking in
several languages at the same time.

I'll work on it.

Tom De Moor

On Feb 12, 12:37*pm, Tom De Moor
wrote:
In article ,
says...



And you live in a grammar and spelling challenged world, not to mention a
tangential world where you can't keep to the topic.

Sorry: I speak and write but 5 languages. And correct: there are some
spelling errors, most of them due to typing too rapidely or thinking in
several languages at the same time.

I'll work on it.

Tom De Moor

Lots of grumpy people on this thread...

Surely the point of the original post was to show that flying entails
risk to life. It's difficult to eliminate all risks, but working to
reduce the biggest risks will likely lead to the biggest benefit in
terms of precious lives saved. Midairs don't contribute much, compared
with all other causes, of your chances of dying in a glider.

writes:

My point is you cannot eliminate mid air collisions no matter what
training is given that you insist will eliminate mid airs.

I don't recall insisting that any training would eliminate midair accidents.
Training is likely to reduce them, however.

... human factor will
contribute to UNAVOIDABLE collisions or errors in flying an
airplane.

Human beings who become careless or reckless and rationalize it by saying that
it's impossible to eliminate accidents, anyway, will surely be involved in new
accidents.

"Unavoidable" is a strong word. There haven't been many incidents that were
truly unavoidable. Just because a human being messes up doesn't mean that the
messing up was impossible to avoid.

But you don't know this since you sit behind a desktop simulator USING
TCAS that most of us don't have.

One advantage of simulation is that you can afford better avionics. However,
only one of my small aircraft (the Baron) is equipped with TCAS, and the very
same instrument (a Sandel ST3400) is available to anyone with a small aircraft
who is prepared to pay for it (about $35,000 for the real-world version, and
1000 times cheaper for the sim version).

Could there be a better process to improve safety, possibly and
probably, but I don't have that answer.

Safety improvements tend to be incremental, not revolutionary.

Dana writes:

If it were possible, sure, but many _more_ lives could be saved by
putting the effort elsewhere. It's a matter of allocation of
resources.

I don't have the numbers, but you're probably right.

The restrictions on flying that an effort to completely eliminate
midairs would mean that pretty much everybody stays on the ground.

True of many safety measures if they are carried to extremes.

Jim Logajan writes:

For example, addition of some machine intelligence in the flight control
systems that takes into account not just pilot demands, but limits to those
demands imposed by the current flight regime, and is active through all
phases of flight so that it aids and/or limits controls to controllable
regimes.

Automation has its own universe of failure modes that is just as difficult to
eliminate as human error (because it is derived largely from human error), and
digital systems in particular have catastrophic failure modes that human-based
systems do not share. So be careful what you wish for.

In any case, Airbus is trying to embrace the philosophy you espouse, not
always successfully.

And to a significant extent, the greater the automation, the less interesting
the activity. It might be pragmatic to automate commercial flight, but flying
for pleasure would probably suffer from excessive automation.

The statistics currently indicate a greater probability of human
failure than machine failure, so this seems likely to yield a net reduction
in the accident rate.

There are no heavily automated systems to compare to, and existing automation
systems have not been analyzed in detail, as far as I know.