[ziggy]

Regina Regina:

ziggy ziggy:

Would you fly on this one?

Nobody gets on them or is allowed to get on them when they look like that either.

I prefer to fly on the redneck version.

[kal]

It will be interesting to see the occurance report from this one. Glad the pilot was able to fly the plane fine... a hole like that would have been creating some wicked drag.

It's not uncommon for aircraft to have "defective" parts in them, or to take off with certain parts missing. Most of the parts are not critical however. Airplanes are interesting -they're very fragile but at the same time incredebly robust, and passenger planes have a ton of redundant systems.

Also, depending on the engine, a bird going through it may not be cause for alarm. Some engines are designed to take bird strikes. Still.. airlines have been known to do stupid things.

[hurley_108]

ziggy ziggy:

If you have facebook then go to the group called "aviation photo contest"There's a few mechanics on there who post pics of bad stuff happening to planes.You may have to go through the subgroups but you will see more then enough to shock you.

I'll try and find some pics.

"Scary" pics are anecdotal evidence of a problem that's incredibly rare. Airline accidents are taken incredibly seriously. When someone dies, somebody finds out why and does their damndest to make sure it never happens again. Sometimes it sucks and near misses go unfixed until someone does die, but the statistics are utterly undeniable.

Between January 1982 and March 2001, only 2301 people died in the US in plane crashes. In 2001 alone, there were 42116 deaths from car crashes. It only takes about a day in the US for as many people to die in cars as will die in the entire year on planes. (Link) Even if we add in the 246 who died in planes on 9/11, not covered in this period, cars still killed more by lunchtime on Jan 4 than died in planes that year. Heck, even if we account for the whole toll of 2974 people on 9/11, plus the average 120 for the year on other crashes, we're not even in February for auto deaths compared to plane and plane-related deaths for the whole year of 2001.

Per billion passenger miles, cars are ten to twenty times more deadly than planes between New York and Boston, depending on the source. (Link)

I don't know if you were trying to say that plane operators are flippant about safety, but that's how it came across, and it's just not borne out by the stats. What shocks me is that we don't apply anything remotely approaching the exacting stndards to road travel as we do to airline travel. Planes are inspected in some manner every time they take off and land. Cars, nope. People freak about airline deaths, but think NOTHING of hopping in the car and going wherever they want to go.

I guess this post is more of a rant about people's screwed up perceptions of risk than a response to your post, Ziggy. Airline incidents freak us out, and rightly so. Death is on the line. But it also is on our roads, and our roads are an order of magnitude more deadly, but we pay that risk mere lip service.