Is it your assertion that they can't get any worse? Because this sounds like a good way to get worse.

You know, they could be killing more than 0.5 people per ten billion passenger miles, right...?

For air travel impacting human lives.

I think it speaks to current generation of leaders avoiding thought, consideration, foresight, insight, and just using any statistic that can justify a decision.

It’s a decline and one that also explains the excitement that LLMs/AI might be able to help us think less, know less, and perhaps be even less responsible for our work products.

A whole door exploded out of a plane and

1. The plane did not suffer structural damage and could land safely 2. Nobody died because seat belts are mandatory 3. The crew is drilled over and over on what to do 4. The plane has extensive monitoring and logging so RCA is easier 5. The US funds a whole org dedicated to investigating this sort of thing and the results are public

and that's just the ones I can think of.

This is shocking precisely because aviation is so good at this. There are multiple layers in the swiss cheese model and this somehow made it past them.

What we're hearing in this thread, from people who have clearly never done much of anything, is that passenger aviation needs to work exactly the same way. "If it can't be perfect, heads must roll. Surely that will fix it."

If this is a genuine comment it’s worth thinking about why you reached straight to defend egregiously bad engineering and manufacturing.

Self driving is a different risk profile, even if you engineer it to the best of human knowledge — people still don’t understand why, and can’t ask why, the system in control of multiple ton vehicles being beta tested ‘in production with human lives’ and marketed as FSD, makes the decisions it makes. Or at least they can’t immediately tell it not to drive into trucks. Which is quite a straightforward thing to ask of a driving control system.

None of those asks are perfection, or more than we’d expect from a child let alone ‘humans’ as a species

You know that current management's numbers are a lot worse than that right?

I wish I knew what would, believe me. I have to deal with the exact same problem, luckily in a factory where there is a lot less at stake.

I just disagree with some proposed solutions in the thread, that's all. Also don't necessarily agree that the situation was any better in the past.

SpaceX has (ok, had) good PR, but they don't do anything others couldn't do. And they'd be bankrupt without NASA.

Most companies would be bankrupt without their customers. A $5 billion government contract isn’t something that can be dismissed as the recipient ‘being kept solvent by Uncle Sam.’