[HN Gopher] How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
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How the airline industry got wise to seat belts
Author : NotSwift
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-08-30 19:40 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.airspacemag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.airspacemag.com)
| gumby wrote:
| Having been once in a aircraft-damaging emergency landing*
| decades ago I am surprised lap only belts are still the norm.
| There's a reason the crew has four point restraints, and I'd like
| to have it too.
|
| * I won't call it a crash since the aircraft made it to an
| airport and to a runway. We had equipment failure in flight so
| there was plenty of time for the flight attendants to review our
| crash positions, confiscate shoes, move people around etc.
| Everybody survived and I think everybody survived the emergency
| slides intact. Very exciting to mid-20s me.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Many business-class airline seats do now have three point
| seatbelts.
| cbhl wrote:
| They seem to have started adding shoulder belts in some of the
| newer fully-lie-flat business/first seats on some airlines.
| chris_j wrote:
| What was it about the emergency landing that made you surprised
| that lap only belts are still the norm? (Apologies if I'm
| asking about something blindingly obvious but I've not been in
| an aircraft-damaging emergency landing and I'm really
| interested to hear more about your experience.)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Probably what was briefly discussed in the article. So long
| as your seat stays anchored, a multipoint harness will keep
| you in position better. The injuries in the one accident were
| from people being moved side-to-side, not forward or up and
| down. The seatbelts didn't injure them, but the armrests did.
| A multipoint harness _could_ (if worn properly) reduce those
| kinds of injuries. Of course, in a total failure where the
| seats become detached from the floor and the aircraft is
| rolling, no seatbelt or harness will save you.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| At an airline training session I attended, a man who
| survived a famous passenger aircraft crash advised that one
| should get as low as possible in their seat and put their
| knees up against the back of the seat in front of you,
| while still buckled. The passengers that died around him
| were killed by the heavy luggage exploding out of the
| overheads and breaking their necks, so it's important to
| have your head below the seat back. The people who sat
| upright also tended to break their noses/faces on the seat
| backs in front of them. The speaker walked away from the
| crash with only a knee injury by bracing himself in the
| reclined position.
| Teever wrote:
| > confiscate shoes
|
| ???
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Some shoes (eg. soccer cleats, heels) can puncture the
| inflatable emergency slides.
| tannedNerd wrote:
| It's for the slides, don't want someone breaking an ankle and
| popping the slide in a high heel.
| worker767424 wrote:
| I thought it was that they don't one a high heel puncturing
| the slide
| clon wrote:
| So you don't ruin the slide
| labster wrote:
| It's a slide rule
| orev wrote:
| This is what most people seem to get wrong about airplane seat
| belts--they are not there for the same reason as in cars:
| crashes. They are there to keep people from flying around and
| getting injured during turbulence.
|
| Crashes in commercial planes are so rare that any single one
| almost always makes the news, while turbulence is extremely
| common. Let's be fair and say that a seatbelt is not going to
| make a whit of difference when colliding with the ground at 200
| MPH, so a 2 or 5 point harness are essentially the same in that
| regard. But a belt is plenty to help with turbulence.
|
| Will there be a few instances, such as yours, where the extra
| protection would have been good? Of course, but there's also a
| trade-off of weight, cost, and public resistance to strapping
| in like a race car driver. The other mitigations seem to work
| well enough when there is a situation.
| jmercouris wrote:
| Turbulence that results in people flying out of their seats
| is exceedingly rare, like a once in a lifetime experience for
| a commercial pilot. Airplanes will go to great lengths to
| avoid bad weather to avoid stressing the airframe and making
| passengers uncomfortable.
| IdontRememberIt wrote:
| During my last flights, I always got 3 points seatbelts.
| Surprisingly, my 4yo was not allowed to buckle it during landing
| and takeoff.
| mertd wrote:
| Business class? Haven't seen anything other than lap belts in
| economy.
| IdontRememberIt wrote:
| Yes. (International flights, before covid.)
| sklargh wrote:
| Recent failures by Boeing aside, the amount of thought that goes
| into the holistic safety of commercial aircraft is astounding. It
| kind of blows my mind how hardened a typical passenger cabin is
| to fire, not to mention other hazards.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yup. The "fatalities per mile" chart is pretty astounding.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...
| zipiridu wrote:
| IIRC takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts, so I'd
| be more interested fatalities per trip. An intercontinental
| plane ride would cover more miles than I drive in a year
| which makes the per mile stat meaningless to me. I think it
| would still be in the plane's favor but probably not as
| significantly. And in that case if you're a safe driver
| (healthy adult, doesn't drink or do drugs, doesn't speed,
| etc) it might skew in favor of driving since I'm sure some
| groups are much higher risk.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The stat is doubly misleading because it is skewed by the
| proliferation of long direct flights as turbofan widebody
| jets proliferated and air travel became more affordable
| which both happened in the same time period as that chart.
|
| I don't think flying is particularly dangerous but the
| person you're replying to is being highly naive or
| misleading by taking that chart at face value.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm neither naive nor misleading. By any measure, airline
| travel - particularly in the US - is remarkably safe.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/13/colgan-air-
| crash-10-years-ag...
| mertd wrote:
| If you are a terrible driver, you can certainly make your
| individual odds of accident a lot worse than the average
| case, but I'm not sure being a good driver improves your
| odds by that much. A lot of the risks are totally out of
| the driver's control (e.g., other road users, equipment,
| weather etc..).
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Choice of weather conditions is within your control, just
| don't drive in terrible weather.
|
| Being a good driver does a ton to insulate you from the
| shenanigans of
|
| Equipment failure is basically a rounding errors but also
| within the driver's control since "flat tire at speed" is
| probably lion's share of crashes in that category.
| pfranz wrote:
| I remember hearing with the rise of regional airlines
| starting in the 90s the number of flight cycles
| (takeoffs/landings) went way up for some types of
| planes...and I assume for the "average flight." An increase
| in the number of short trips would make lowing the per-mile
| rating more impressive.
| mpalczewski wrote:
| Hmm, after looking at that, and always being told that
| airlines are the safest. I was surprised they are only safest
| by that one metric (fatalities / distance) and not fatalities
| per trip or fatalities per hour.
| bmitc wrote:
| I have personally never liked being blankly told that
| flying is safer than driving, because I'd like to
| understand how safe flying is versus driving _when
| something goes wrong_.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Things "go wrong" fairly "frequently" on airplanes but
| they are hardened for this with redundant systems and
| manual (as well as computer) overrides. You don't hear
| about most of them but they are all logged and used for
| improvements.
|
| The main difference is when a car has a catastrophic
| failure there's a good chance the people involved
| survive.
| bmitc wrote:
| I suppose by wrong I mean something more than the
| redundant, robust, and various protection systems can
| handle. For example, on a car, I wouldn't consider the
| anti-lock brake system kicking in as something going
| wrong.
|
| I've had an engine failure in my car while driving it. I
| simply was able to slow to a crawl until I got home. I
| don't think engine failure on an airplane is such an
| anti-climatic event, on average.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I don't think engine failure on an airplane is such an
| anti-climatic event, on average.
|
| It often is, actually. They have more than one engine
| precisely for that scenario, and can fly quite well with
| one down.
|
| Even if you lose all four on a 747, there's surprisingly
| large amounts of time to troubleshoot if you're at
| cruise.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Two seconds of inattention in a car is a lot more likely
| to kill you than it is in a plane. It's fairly constant
| risk - going off the shoulder is just a few dozen feet at
| most.
|
| They also tend to be less well maintained, and the other
| participants less trained.
| bmitc wrote:
| That makes sense at first glance, but it's something I'm
| in control of. I was even thinking of this before,
| because the comparison is a little mismatched. I'm 100%
| likely to be a passenger when I'm in any plane, whereas
| I'm probably >98% likely to be a driver when I'm in a
| car.
|
| I'm not sure why I was downvoted, because I'm just
| stating I'd like to understand (data/studies) instead of
| people's anecdotes and opinions, including my own.
|
| My intuition is that car travel has a constant level of
| risk, whereas plane travel has a level of risk much below
| that when everything is good but (I'm guessing here) that
| risk goes much higher than the constant risk of car
| travel when something goes wrong (failure, human mistake,
| crash, birds, weather, etc.). I've searched for it before
| and didn't find anything, but it'd be nice to see any
| studies that confirm or deny this.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Considering that ~half of collisions involve multiple
| vehicles, I suspect your feeling of being in control is a
| bit of an illusion.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Those seem like odd metrics to go by.
| namdnay wrote:
| Fatalities per hour seems like a reasonable statistic if
| you want to talk about fear - how likely am I to die in
| the next 5mn?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If my goal is "I wish to spend X hours in a form of
| transit", sure. If I need to get from LA to NYC,
| though... there's a lot more of those 5 minute periods if
| I'm driving.
| ghaff wrote:
| What you probably really want to compare flying and
| driving is fatalities per trip--for the same trip. As
| others have noted, a longer trip in a plane is almost
| certainly safer than a shorter trip given where accidents
| happen. (And the effect may or may not be further
| magnified by the fact that I assume the accident rate is
| higher on small regional jets. Though, on the other hand,
| they carry fewer people.) On the other hand, driving is
| probably much more proportional to distance.
| worker767424 wrote:
| Remember that takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous
| part of the trip.
| hansthehorse wrote:
| I usually hear it stated that it's the first two and last
| 8 minutes of any flight.
| bittercynic wrote:
| Surely the danger is almost always right after the flight
| ends :-)
| slownews45 wrote:
| And despite the complaints, US pax travel (scheduled) is
| INSANELY safe relative to most other forms of transport.
|
| They fly us around in tin cans at 30,000 feet without killing
| that many folks per year. I'd love to get status of fatalities
| per motorcycle mile vs airline mile. Got to be remarkably
| different.
| runako wrote:
| Data for transport modes excluding motorcycles:
| https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-
| topics...
|
| (airplanes are zero most years)
|
| Data for motorcycles:
|
| https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-
| motorcyc...
|
| Eyeballing, it looks like motorcycles have roughly ~50x as
| many fatalities per mile as passenger autos.
| trangus_1985 wrote:
| I've been riding for a long time. I definitely spent effort
| understanding risks and safety.
|
| Motorcycle fatalities are mostly similar to factors that
| cause car fatalities, but extremely exacerbated.
|
| For example, about 40% of motorcycle fatalities involve
| alcohol. One drink before riding a motorcycle is about
| equivalent to 4 before you drive.
|
| Riding at night accounts for a significant amount of
| fatalities, as does unprotected left turns. Oversteering is
| another major factor, usually because you went too fast
| through a turn.
|
| Also, motorcycle fatalities are currently rising. This is
| largely due to older people who have wanted to ride but
| couldn't or were afraid to. A 65 year old man on a 800lb
| 1.5L engine bike who's a new rider is going to take a bad
| situation a lot harder than a younger person on a smaller
| bike.
|
| Motorcycles are more dangerous than cars, but if you
| understand the risks and employ constant self-improvement
| in your skills, you really begin to reduce your exposure to
| risk. Unfortunately, it does somewhat select for a group
| that likes to take risks.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Commercial aircraft are very safe, GA aircraft (your uncle
| with a cessna), are about as safe as motorcycles.
|
| https://inspire.eaa.org/2017/05/11/how-safe-is-it/
| dmurray wrote:
| I don't know why this was downvoted. It's true, and an
| important correction to the GP's NSC link and the claim
| that "airplanes are zero most years". Notice that that
| page compares "scheduled airlines" to "passenger
| vehicles" (I think they mean cars? Since airplanes,
| trains and buses are also passenger vehicles...) but
| importantly does not include GA.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It makes sense. Motorcycles are unforgiving in terms of
| safety features and attract disorganized and reckless
| people like flies to light.
|
| Successful pilots are the opposite personality. They tend
| to be adventurous in terms of seeking experiences but are
| able to embrace following strict rules.
| barrkel wrote:
| Per unscientific survey cited in
| https://www.rideapart.com/news/254972/why-your-next-
| motorcyc... 85% of pilots have motorcycle licenses.
|
| There are many breeds of motorcycle rider, as I'm sure
| there are different breeds of pilot. The pipe and
| slippers brigade very much embrace following strict
| rules. In the UK, you'll frequently find them in RoSPA,
| where they follow the System of Motorcycle Control.
|
| I don't know how true to life the Top Gun cliche of
| fighter pilot / sportsbike rider is, but anecdotally
| riding a sportsbike is the closest experience a civilian
| can get to a fighter plane on the ground.
|
| Motorcycle racers are usually pretty exacting about the
| mechanical state and safety of their bike, and many top
| ranked competitive riders never ride on the road, only on
| track. The hazards on track vs on road are almost
| completely different.
|
| Amateur stunters, weekend warriors and young squids are
| more likely matches to the cliche I think you have in
| mind: thrill-seekers who dabble but not particularly
| serious about it.
| slownews45 wrote:
| I'm actually a rider (or was).
|
| They don't attract reckless people. But what happens, you
| get used to the speed, the risk, the cornering - and so
| yes, you start going faster and faster. Problem is -
| hitting something at 100 on a bike, even just a little
| something on road - can be seriously game over. I stopped
| riding (kid / wife etc).
| [deleted]
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > It kind of blows my mind how hardened a typical passenger
| cabin is to fire
|
| That's far from true for the interior.
|
| Things have improved over the years, but the interior is mostly
| plastic. This became a major concern after the investigation of
| the London ground fire where half the passengers died of smoke
| inhalation, and the 1998 JFK Swissair accident where the
| entertainment system wiring burned through.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111
|
| In the 2013 SFO Asiana accident the interior fiercely burned,
| for example (see pics in W):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
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