While there many silly reasons to force people to shutdown electronics and such on planes, I think forcing people to not have any distractions during take-offs and landings is a good thing.
Over 50% of incidents (fatal and hull loss/non-fatal) occurring during landing:
Even more so: Keeping the shades open could have really made a significant difference in this case, because it could have helped the flight attendants to quickly determine the exits that are safe.
> it could have helped the flight attendants to quickly determine the exits that are safe.
For obvious reasons, ordering the evacuation, in conjunction with criteria such as which side and which doors is the Captain's job, or if the Captain is incapacitated, the First Officer. They will have access to far more data than the cabin crew will (e.g. whether the engines are safely shut down, circumstances on the ground thanks to radio contact etc.).
The Cabin Crew will not make the decision themselves unless they have been unable to establish contact with the cockpit (i.e. both flight crew incapacitated). In normal circumstances the Cabin Crew are only there to action the Flight Crew's orders.
This is not at all obvious. The pilots can't look backwards and don't have eyes in the cabin. There have been cases of engine fires and failures where the pilots had to go into the passenger cabin to examine the damage.
Communication is key, but comms might have been down, too. In cases like this the cabin crew have to be prepared to initiate an evacuation on their own, and they have to be prepared to choose which doors to use.
> the cabin crew have to be prepared to initiate an evacuation on their own
Re-read my post, because your conclusion is saying exactly what I already said with your words "be prepared to".
To repeat what I said, but in simpler terms:
In an ideal world, the Flight Crew have the responsibility for ordering evacuation and the associated parameters. End of story, no argument.
BUT there is a well rehearsed, well practiced, protocol which surrounds this !
So, at one extreme, if the Cabin Crew cannot communicate with the Flight Deck, then the decision is clearly theirs.
But before the extreme, we have the obvious scenario .... Cabin Crew act as additional eyes and ears for Flight Crew.
BUT in this scenario we are back to my main point ... the buck stops at the Captain to make the decision !!! The Cabin Crew are telling the Captain what they see, its ultimately his call.
> They will have access to far more data than the cabin crew will (e.g. whether the engines are safely shut down, circumstances on the ground thanks to radio contact etc.).
This is not remotely guaranteed. It would be more accurate to say that the pilots will have access to information that the cabin crew don't have access to and vice versa. If the cabin crew sees that the plane has stopped, there's a fire on board, and instructions are not forthcoming from the pilots, the cabin crew absolutely must initiate an evacuation sua sponte. Heck, if the cabin crew won't do it then the passengers might. People can and do freeze in the face of emergencies. When you have a fire on board all bets are off, and someone had better step up and begin the evacuation -- better that it all be orderly than not, but also better that it happen at all than not.
If the Captain says "evacuate from all doors on port side", yet the FA sees flames outside the door on the port side, the FA does not evacuate through those flames
Right! In a chaotic situation, the idea of hierarchy goes out the window. It is essential that all act rationally as much as possible and make the best decisions that they can with what information is available to them. And it is essential that all staff (flight crew, cabin crew) act with celerity as well to avoid panic among the passengers. Because if the passengers are left on their own then conflicts are more likely to arise just merely on account of the number of passengers being large, and conflicts in such a situation are very likely to be deadly.
Notably, Qantas Flight 32 back in 2010, where the flight crew had a dozen contradictory ECAM messages, and it took the second officer entering the cabin to see that an engine had blown up. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...
>In the meantime, the cabin crew had been attempting to get the pilots’ attention using the emergency call button, but all the pilots were so focused on the failures that they initially didn’t notice. Only now did they send Second Officer Mark Johnson to assess the situation in the cabin, whereupon a Qantas pilot riding as a passenger in the upper deck drew his attention to the in-flight entertainment system, which featured a live view of the aircraft from a tail-mounted camera. The digital stream clearly showed a much more literal stream of fuel pouring from the left wing and into the aircraft’s wake, which was also visible with the naked eye from the lower deck. Johnson proceeded down to check for himself, at which point he also observed for the first time that there were two gaping holes in the top of the left wing, surrounded by jagged metal, where the turbine disk fragments had exited.
The Airbus A350 has an external camera mounted on the tail. I believe that pilots can monitor that video feed in the cockpit so if the system is still working then they should be able to see a fire on one side. But I don't know whether that was possible in this incident.
Cabin crew play a critical role in informing the flight deck of external conditions especially fire that would preclude use of specific exits in an evacuation.
If you look into enough NTSB investigations communication is often the first thing to go during a crash. Even if everyone is still coherent technical problems alone can have quite horrific results. Using a megaphone to communicate is just not that useful in a plane.
Which is why every flight attended will stay at their assigned doors instead of comforting passengers. They seem to have quite a bit responsibility when it comes to determining if its a functioning escape route.
Makes sense, but why do we have to open the shades during take-off and landing? It's a honest question, I always heard in case of emergency for the personnel being able to see all sides, but if that's not it, what is it?
It is so the flight attendants can see outside, and also so the passengers’ eyes are adapted to outside light in case of an evacuation. You don’t want people hesitating on the slides because they can’t see.
I asked a flight attendant about the window shades once, and in addition to the visibility reasons, she also said it was to help create a uniform view. They need to scan for anything that is out of place, and having the shades randomly open or closed impedes that pattern matching.
The number of fatalities and injuries seems minuscule because it's normalised over distance traveled.
This makes sense, because air travel is the only way to make voyages over this distance. But it also doesn't make sense for the same reason -- it's stupid to compare a 6000 mile holiday flight with a 6000 mile holiday road trip, because people don't routinely make those. You're still more likely to get injured on an eight hour car ride than on an eight hour flight, but the difference isn't a factor 600.
In much the same way, air travel is also arguably moderately efficient in terms of CO2 per mile, except that it's also a super easy way -- in fact, practically the only way -- to accrue tens of thousands of miles every year, so the efficiency is kind of irrelevant.
I know people who are already at the "if driving takes less than 8 hours, I'd rather drive than fly" level. Every additional inconvenience (or psychological impediment) added to the safest mode of long-distance travel has a risk of decreasing overall safety.
It's not particularly relevant to an international flight into Japan, but the extent to which increasing annoyance/instilling fear of airline passengers causing people to drive instead must be weighed against the small safety benefit resulting from a policy of telling passengers "we think this phase of flight contains the most highly concentrated risk, so for the next 15 minutes, please put away all of your distractions, prepare for a possible crash, and try not to think about the fact that we could turn this aircraft into a tumbling, burning ball of wreckage at any moment."
Something similar was the primary justification to support the continuation of "infant in arms" travel by passengers under the age of 2, with an expected 60:1 ratio of lives that would be lost if infants were required to occupy ticketed seats vs being carried in arms.
For other people who might not have followed completely: the NTAB don’t say (explicitly) that forcing children to occupy a seat of their own would result in 60 times as many deaths. They estimated the risk of lap infant deaths as 1 every 10 years, and then they estimated that if the cost of travel increased for families, enough families would instead choose to drive that 60 infants would die in road accidents in that same 10 year period.
I once traveled for business from Salt Lake City to Fort Collins, Colorado.
1/2 hour to the airport + get to the airport 2 hours before flight + 1 hour direct flight to Denver + 1/2 hour to deplane + 1/2 hour to get bags + 1/2 hour to get rental car + 1 hour drive to Fort Collins. Total 6 hours. Seems like it actually totalled 7 but I don't remember where the extra time was.
Versus 7 hours drive time from Salt Lake to Fort Collins.
And if two people are going, you only drive one car, but you buy two plane tickets.
And my car has more legroom than a coach seat.
So, yes, flying is safer per mile, but the "under 8 hours" crowd also have a point...
That’s me. But for totally different reasons. I’m a 4-5 hour round trip by car to the nearest airport that actually flys anywhere. So unless it’s more than about a 8-10 hour drive, it’s faster (and way cheaper) to drive than fly.
We literally decided to drive from UK to Poland this year(12 hour overnight ferry + another 12 hours of driving) instead of flying, because we hate Christmas flying so much, it's always a shit show, we always end up ill because everyone is coughing, at least with driving we can take it at our own pace - we want to stop, we stop.
The statistics are also available as "per passenger-hour", which eliminates the speed factor. An 8 hour road trip is reasonable. An 8 hour flight is on the longer side.
An 8 hour flight is a normal intercontinental flight, not even particularly long (London - New York/Delhi/Nairobi/Dubai sort of distance). Longer flights like London-LA/Singapore/Joburg/Tokyo are perfectly normal, or reasonable.
I would rarely do 8 hours driving in a single day, let alone 12. Certainly couldn't do that for work, would be massively against policy.
Similar to the Jevons Paradox, where increases in energy efficiency often lead to greater overall consumption, as the higher efficiency broadens the scope of the activity.
And for anyone who remembers the electronics during takeoff and landing ban once cell phones became common it was a massive hassle for flight attendants as many passengers routinely ignored instructions.
Never really understood this "we can't enforce the rules because people routinely ignore the rules" attitude. This should be dead simple on an airplane, where the airline knows who each passenger is by seat. So have one flight attendant make one pass down the aisle warning everyone to put away their phones, then have another one follow a minute or so later just making note of which seats are still using their phones. No-fly-list them all later. After this policy became known, people would be strongly incentivized to get with the program.
Even when there was a rule that cell-phones were supposed to be turned off, studies showed that 20-25% of cell phones were still active (Possibly forgotten in pockets) - wasting time, energy, traveler patience, on something that was entirely theater (I don't believe there was ever a single incident associated with an active cell phone - which makes sense given the 10s of thousands per day that were powered on during takeoff) - seems like the worst possible tradeoff ever. The "No cell phone use during takeoff" or "No mobile phone use during flight" (China Air used to do that - very, very annoying) - bureaucracy flex just because the could.
I think the "no cellphones" rule is about minimizing distractions during critical phases of flight, not because a phone's radio is going to do damage to the aircraft. So a phone on but sitting in someone's bag is not the end of the world.
> the "no cellphones" rule is about minimizing distractions during critical phases of flight, not because a phone's radio is going to do damage to the aircraft
The cell-phone "ban was put in place because of potential interference to wireless networks on the ground" [1]. The distraction argument started making its rounds after the interference hypothesis was debunked.
Aircraft electronics were also a commonly given reason for a time. And as for distracted ions there was a period when you could read a physical book but not a Kindle.
No distraction? Do you need sub 500ms response time? I'm pretty sure that even someone watching a movie with noise canceling earphones was aware of an issue just because of physics…
If you want to make the case for adding additional safety procedures (no distractions during take-offs and landings) then you have to actually make the case. It's not enough to just assert that they seem minor if the benefit would also be minor. How much do you think this policy would reduce deaths?
Taking simple steps to be more aware of your surroundings when something dangerous is happening seems self-evident to me. Please let me know what flights are you taking and when so that I can make sure I'm not on the same plane.
My rule of thumb is "know where the exits are", and "know where the life jackets are" if flying over water. Those are the bits that differ the most plane to plane -- seatbelts are consistent, clear paths during takeoff and landing are consistent, oxygen masks are consistent, but I want to know where the exits are and how to float.
There are huge numbers of opportunities to trade off inconvenience against reduced death. For example, we could prohibit radios in cars because the music and adjustment can be distracting and lead to collisions. Or ban cars entirely since they're much more dangerous than walking and public transport. We could require everyone to wear an N95 all winter. Ban phones for the entirety of the flight, and prohibit books as well. Happy to give more examples of similarly bad tradeoffs!
If you make policy with a principle of being unwilling to trade off deaths against inconvenience in any circumstance you'll have somewhat fewer deaths and unbearable levels of inconvenience.
Furthermore, distracted or unprepared passengers impact the evacuation of others trapped behind them. I’ve participated in evacuation training for flight attendants and have personally witnessed how a bungled jump down evacuation slide led to a 5-10 second delay. This was equated with ~20 fatalities due to smoke inhalation in the simulation.
My objection isn't that the impact of banning electronics during takeoff and landing is unknowable; that's not the main issue with banning car radios, cars, or bare faces either. Instead it's that the impact is too small to be worth the cost.
I think its fair to say I misread the thrust of your argument. I still come down on the other side; I am comfortable enforcing a widespread deprivation of a convenience in order to further reduce the risk of a rare but catastrophic outcome.
Realize that if you make commercial air travel sufficiently (further) unpleasant, many of those people will choose to drive to their destinations instead.
This will cause a net increase in deaths because, mile-for-mile, driving is orders of magnitude more deadly than flying commercial.
Banning car stereos would be a good idea. Besides distracting drivers, listening to music also helps people push past their normal fatigue limit and drive for much longer than they should. Driving tired is about as dangerous as driving drunk.
I'm curious what the relevant part of that article is? As far as I can tell the only pertinent reference to passenger behaviour is the listing of "Passengers' knowledge of safety procedures and their motivation to get acquainted with them" as a factor in evacuation, which...does not really have anything to do with whether the passenger is "distracted" at the moment of an incident occurring.
I feel like people are equating "not paying attention" (which, what does that even mean for a passenger in a jetliner? not paying attention to what?) with "unpreparedness" when that doesn't really make any sense.
The inconvenience vs risk threshold here is similar to bucking a seatbelt which is hard to argue is a poor investment.
Aircraft may be very safe on a per mile basis, but those risks are extremely concentrated around takeoff and landing. Which are fast events, so the risk per second is relatively high even though flying is generally much safer than driving.
> The inconvenience vs risk threshold here is similar to bucking a seatbelt which is hard to argue is a poor investment.
It really, really is not. Seatbelts actively prevent injuries from sudden violent phenomena. "Paying attention" does absolutely nothing to reduce the forces you are subject to in the event of, say, a collision with a Dash 8 that was on your runway at landing. It helps post-incident at best.
And I have "paying attention" in quotes because I feel like people are ignoring how attention actually works when they propose things like this. Human brains actively reroute focus in response to stimuli - like, say, a collision with a Dash 8 that was on your runway at landing. That's the whole concept of "a distraction". Hell, just a car braking particularly hard is stimulus enough to capture its passengers' attention, to talk of a plane landing going wrong in such a catastrophic manner. By the time the cabin crew is even ready to begin an evacuation, whether or not a person was fiddling with their phone (or just staring into space) some seconds before the incident seems highly irrelevant.
Fast isn’t instant. At 30,000 feet there’s plenty of time, at ground level things can go very badly extremely quickly and rapid task switching increases panic.
There’s several ways paying attention directly increases safety. First many evacuations aren’t fast enough for everyone to escape so even fractions of a second directly correlate to lives. Taking the crash position promptly reduces the risk of injury most importantly disabling injuries which may slow people exiting the aircraft. Safety briefings give relevant information in the event of an emergency which means people act more appropriately.
For one thing, an evacuation is not something you begin to do the instant an accident occurs; it takes time to reach a physical state where evacuation is even possible at all. For instance, there is video footage from the inside of the A350 (taken by a passenger who was...you know...using their phone, and all 379 people on the board still exited in a timely manner). It took well over 10 seconds for the plane to even finish its landing roll-out post-collision and come to a stop. Handwringing over the fractions of a second that it took a passenger that was "paying attention" and someone that was looking at their phone or reading a book to realise that the plane had had an accident makes no sense. There is nothing either of them can do or should do until the situation has stabilised somewhat.
For another, taking the brace position is something you do with forewarning and instruction from the crew, and the circumstances that lead to that forewarning are very capable of capturing attention. Additionally, safety briefings are given when the plane is very firmly planted on the ground pre-flight (cabin crew may repeat/re-explain instructions like how to put on a life vest or how to properly take a brace position during an emergency if circumstances permit). And that's really the crux of it: the time for a passenger to pay attention is while they are being briefed or otherwise addressed by the crew, and while they can properly review their specific plane's safety information and setup. After that, there is literally nothing for the passenger to actively pay attention to.
Staring very hard at the seat in front of you or out of the window "in case something happens" is not paying attention to anything but your own anxiety. You can be prepared and be ready for alerts without literally sitting and doing nothing; the human brain may not be capable of a lot of things, but it is very capable of that much.
First electronic devices + headphones provide significant isolation from what’s going on. I’ve seen people miss fire alarms in an office environment. So it’s possible for someone to actually miss an evacuation not just fail to respond for fractions of a second.
> It took well over 10 seconds for the plane to even finish its landing roll-out post-collision and come to a stop.
Panic and confusion can last considerably longer than 10 seconds. Having even a little head start to process the situation is meaningful well past the initial event.
> taking the brace position is something you do with forewarning and instruction from the crew, and the circumstances that lead to that forewarning are very capable of capturing attention.
Most emergencies aren’t preceded by anything particularly attention grabbing. Someone engrossed with a device can easily miss what’s going on long enough to cause issues.
> Staring very hard at the seat in front of you or out of the window "in case something happens" is not paying attention to anything but your own anxiety. You can be prepared and be ready for alerts without literally sitting and doing nothing; the human brain may not be capable of a lot of things, but it is very capable of that much.
Not all tasks are equally distracting. A kid eating a candy bar is more capable of processing what’s going on than that same kid engrossed in a game trying to ignore all outside stimuli while aiming for a high score.
I agree that the case for banning electronics during takeoff and landing is much stronger than the case for banning them for the whole flight, but I'm primarily objecting to FrustratedMonky claiming that we shouldn't ever chose policies that would lead to additional deaths, regardless of the level of inconvenience that this would impose.
If you wanted to give a fermi calculation for the fraction of aircraft traveler deaths that this proposal would prevent I'd be happy to think more about this, and you might convince me. My sense that the tradeoff is not worth it is based on thinking that (a) there aren't that many deaths to be prevented and (b) banning the devices wouldn't increase the chance of survival during an evacuation by very much.
See, thing is, ypur oinion doesn't really matter when it comes to banning electronics during take of and landing, mine doesn't neither. Airlines and regulators decided that, for safety reasons, electronics are banned for passengers. Same as with red traffic lights and speed limits, it stops there.
For what it 's worth so, I don't consider people having 20 minutes less screen time to be considered a prize to be paid, let alone one big enough to change reugulations over.
> Airlines and regulators decided that, for safety reasons, electronics are banned for passengers.
Huh? Electronics are allowed on flights in most countries, including in Japan, and including on the specific flight we're talking about. We're discussing whether it would be good for regulators to ban devices and anything else distracting during takeoff and landing.
I fly a lot.
I see people using electronics for scrolling through photos, playing candy crush, browsing reddit, etc...
The point is, that allowing these activities for a few more minutes during takeoff/landing, is not providing any benefit that would justify killing even 1 person, let alone hundreds.
It isn't like someone is going to use that extra 5-10 minutes of using their device to cure cancer.
My guess is the number of lives saved by your proposal ("forcing people to not have any distractions during take-offs and landings") would be well under one annually, certainly below "hundreds". The total number of plane deaths is already low, and the fraction where a slightly more efficient evacuation would have made a difference is even lower.
I think we may also disagree about how much it matters to subject ~4.5B people annually (the total number of passengers) to an additional ten minutes of boredom? That's something like 1,000 lifetimes each year.
But do think that when a 1000 lifetimes are sliced into 5 minute chunks, those 5 minutes become less useful. It is false to equate this to loosing a 1000 lifetimes of productive effort. Like if this time is added up, it equates to killing a 1000 people.
Think because airline safety is so good, that it is easy to come up with these types of large number arguments.
I don't think that LW post says what you think it's saying? It's coining the term "fallacy of large numbers" to apply to the situation where someone is incorrectly asserting their situation has sufficiently large numbers to apply "law of large numbers" style reasoning.
I agree that 5 minutes to each of 1000 people, especially 5min on your phone on a plane, are less valuable than 5k minutes to one person. But I don't think they're so massively less valuable that we can ignore them as trivial!
Maybe I'm mistaking that with "Law of truly large numbers"
With a huge number, it is possible to make something look reasonable or un-reasonable. Wasting billions of hours of peoples time. Sounds bad, we should get rid of that.
But that is also the time when people should be watching the safety video. Which can impact a few lives. Like remembering where the safety doors are.
Maybe this is more along those lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_truly_large_numbers
The law of truly large numbers (a statistical adage), attributed to Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, states that with a large enough number of independent samples, any highly implausible (i.e. unlikely in any single sample, but with constant probability strictly greater than 0 in any sample) result is likely to be observed.[1] Because we never find it notable when likely events occur, we highlight unlikely events and notice them more.
The law is meant to make a statement about probabilities and statistical significance: in large enough masses of statistical data, even minuscule fluctuations attain statistical significance. Thus in truly large numbers of observations, it is paradoxically easy to find significant correlations, in large numbers, which still do not lead to causal theories (see: spurious correlation), and which by their collective number,[4] might lead to obfuscation as well
> that is also the time when people should be watching the safety video
I thought we were talking about the most dangerous parts of a flight, takeoff and landing, which are not when the safety video (or presentation) happens?
> With a huge number, it is possible to make something look reasonable or un-reasonable. Wasting billions of hours of peoples time. Sounds bad, we should get rid of that.
I agree that we're not good at thinking about this kind of scale. I think a better way to make this at a scale that works well is to look at everything on a per-person basis. So if it saves one life per year (which I suspect is high) then we're balancing 10min of boredom against 0.0002 micromorts [1], in the same range as traveling 270ft by car. Someone who would rather ride 100mi in a car with their phone than 101mi in a car without their phone is already ok with this kind of risk. [2]
[1] 1 in 4.5B chance of death
[2] 230mi per micromort, so 100mi is 0.435 micromorts and 101mi is 0.439 for a difference of 0.004 micromorts. If the journey is 1.5hr then this is 9 rounds of trading off 10min of boredom for 0.0004 micromorts. Which is twice the risk of death we're positing in the airplane example.
Typically the phones have to be off by the time the safety video is happening. I think they do this on purpose so you are paying attention. Seems like they occur very close together.
I might be assuming too much overlap, like if there is longer delay waiting on tarmac. There probably is a lot of variance in this, so maybe it isn't really good point.
I'm completely on board with making sacrifices for something greater than oneself, but since there are so many opportunities to make such sacrifices if we don't prioritize we'll spend all our efforts in places where the effects are minimal.
>Incredibly, people can walk and chew gum at the same time. This includes the ability to refocus their attention when they experience unusual events.
No. They can't. That 'refocus' you mention is proof of that.
it's getting old having to say over and over again that this isn't actually the case : humans switch contexts and lose focus -- you're not as good at multi-tasking as you think, nor is anyone.
So , people can walk OR chew bubble gum , and if these choose to they can pay contextual switching costs between the two to make outside spectators believe that they can do two things at once.
Don't fall for the ruse, there is a cost even if it's a small one.
Similarly, in a disaster i'd rather be surrounded by fit young soldiers without cell-phones -- alert and aware -- than I would be surrounded by the typical multi-variant airliner crowd that must have their attention drug away from the device by the sound of crunching metal.
It's obvious to me that a group of alert and ready people will outperform 'the other group' in an escape in nearly every metric, i'd hope that the same would be obvious to the other humans trying to escape fiery wreckage alongside me.
You're not allowed to use laptops or have the tray down because those are active physical hazards even in fairly routine landings not because of some nebulous idea of you being "distracted".
This thread was started with throw0101d saying "I think forcing people to not have any distractions during take-offs and landings is a good thing", and we've been discussing how to weigh the inconvenience and boredom of prohibiting distractions against the reduced risk of death via more efficient evacuations.
The idea of putting down your phone for an hour in total being "too inconvenient" as people seemingly willingly sign over their dignity for a $10 cheaper flight ticket is.... uninspiring.
You seem really certain that passengers would be so wrapped up in their phones that they would be too distracted to promptly realize... there was a collision with another plane, causing their plane to split open and burst into flames.
That 'prompt realization' takes actual time from an escape when it doesn't necessarily need to.
I have no problem with the idea that humans can re-prioritize; but I do have a problem that people seem to think that the re-prioritization effort comes for free, instantly. We don't work that way as humans.
There's phone footage from inside the burning plane, so apparently your theories don't correspond with reality. Always quite annoying when that happens. Been the death of many a theory.
people seem to think that the re-prioritization effort
comes for free, instantly
Here are the two biggest flaws in your thinking:
1. You seem to be assuming the alternative to "using one's phone during a landing" is some sort of highly aware ready state. In reality it's probably bored snoozing or half-snoozing. It's a red-eye flight after all.
2. You seem to be assuming that "evacuating a burning plane" is some kind of split-second thing, like a quicktime event in a video game. In reality, at least for this incident, there was a span of a significant number of seconds between "impact" and "plane slows down enough for emergency slides to extend and evacuation to begin." 30, maybe 60 seconds.... I'm not sure, but there was no real positive action for a passenger to take during that time. Shifting attention away from one's phone certainly has a nonzero time cost, but not remotely comparable to the time it took for the plane to come to a full stop.
Again, you're dealing in hypotheticals, while the actual reality of this incident (phones in use, orderly exit achieved, all lives saved) contradicts whatever it is you are imagining.
The difference between 180s and 90s is 90s: if (e.g.) ~30 people out of ~350 passengers (<10%) take an extra 3 seconds each because they are not aware of their surroundings, that time is eaten up.
1. Passengers on JL516 were not permitted to use their phones during landing.
2. I'm proposing that we start allowing them to use their phones.
3. If we did that then all 379 passengers would have died [1] because evacuation would have taken longer than the time before the plane was engulfed in flames [2]
Except #1 isn't the case: passengers were allowed to be on their phones and were doing so. And so #2 isn't the case either: I'm proposing maintaining the status quo.
And even if we had granted #1 and #2 I don't see how you get #3 because even if the extra time were entirely eaten up by 30 distracted passengers this wouldn't get you 100% dead: people don't leave in a single batch determined by the speed of the slowest person. There are multiple parallel exits, and each exit operates serially.
> And even if we had granted #1 and #2 I don't see how you get #3 because even if the extra time were entirely eaten up by 30 distracted passengers this wouldn't get you 100% dead:
You are right that it does not necessarily follow that 100% would be dead. AC 797 had a flash fire after 90 seconds, and only about half the people died. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People keep pointing out to you that passengers were in fact using their phones to record footage of the interior of the plane (eg to let their friends/relatives know what was going on in case they didn't make it). Of course people are easily distracted by phones when they should be paying attention to other things, but virtually all people already in an emergency situation are fully present unless they're injured or caring for an injured person. I think you're underestimating people's ability to multitask when they know it matters.
I once heard a wise doctor say that even if the chance of survival for a medical operation is either 10% or 90%, the practical chance the patient is battling is always 50% because he either lives or dies from that operation.
Likewise, the chance of someone being in an aviation accident is close to nil (you're more likely to be in a car accident), but you are either going to be in an aviation accident or not (a 50% chance) and you're going to be either dead or alive from it (a 50% chance).
So you might as well at least not have your epitaph be "Killed by some bozo in the aisle TikToking" if you do end up dying.
> even if the chance of survival for a medical operation is either 10% or 90%, the practical chance the patient is battling is always 50% because he either lives or dies from that operation
I think this is rarely a productive way to think about it. For example, the chance that I might die in the next year is somewhere between 0% and 100%, and actuarial tables put it somewhere around 0.3%. [1] Should I refrain from having a kid because I'd have a "50% chance" of leaving them without a dad before they turned 1?
Well, using this logic, every day you have a 50% chance of dying, since you either die or you don't. Or perhaps every second you have a 50% chance of dying.
It clearly does not work in any circumstances. We over-emphasise the likelihood of rare events already, saying that something has even odds just because it is conceivable that it could happen is completely useless.
Which is not to say that you should not plan for extremely rare events, but you certainly should not make decisions assuming they are likely to happen.
I think you're maybe missing the point. My understanding would be something like:
My chances of being killed by a shark is basically 0%. But, if I'm in a shark cage surrounded by sharks the idea that some global probability is 0% isn't relevant. Something like that?
If I'm in a shark cage then the probability that matters is conditional on being in a shark cage, sure. And it should certainly be higher than the global probability. But I don't see how this connects to saying that anything that can go two ways is 50-50? ("always 50% because he either lives or dies from that operation")
I think the 50% part should be ignored and the message is "when dealing with an individual sample, the general probability distribution isn't that useful?" I don't actually agree with that, just trying to steel man the point a bit. I do kind of see what he means
I had a dentist explain to me that my lip could go numb with a 50% chance after my wisdom teeth removal with that exact explanation just two minutes before the surgery. I was infuriated, turns out I was on the lucky side of her coin.
I could be wrong, but I really don’t think permanent loss of sensitivity is anywhere that high. Though it sounds low for temporary loss, but then it goes away after a couple of hours or so.
It can really depend on how badly impacted the wisdom teeth are. There's apparently a lot of nerve bundles around the back of the jaw bone. If they really need to dig in there to get it out there's a risk. I've had multiple dentists talk to me about my wisdom teeth and all have talked about there being some significant risks with mine.
I recall the original context was that telling a patient to not worry because the chance of success is high isn't actually helpful, because the objective argument doesn't take into account the patient's personal perspective.
I've since extrapolated that to meaning that objective measures cannot always tell or respect the whole story, because personal perspectives can bowdlerize everything down to life or death or a 50% chance.
To put it another way: Telling someone they have a negligible chance of being in an aviation accident is worthless comfort if they end up in one.
> Telling someone they have a negligible chance of being in an aviation accident is worthless comfort if they end up in one.
It's significant comfort in all those flights where no crashes occur, and for most of the time up to and during those that do end in crashes.
Anyone who really believes they are about to embark on an activity having a 0.5 probability of killing them should put their affairs in order, but then, by the same reasoning, there's a 0.5 probability of dying while doing that!
I believe the fallacy here is using an uninformative uniform prior when a much better, empirically-verified one is available.
>because the objective argument doesn't take into account the patient's personal perspective.
Suppose a friend is afraid of crossing the street. Would it be more helpful from a personal perspective POV to tell your friend the odds of being hit by a car, or to make up the fact that you are just as likely to die today crossing that street as not dying? Because the latter strikes me as unhelpful from either an objective perspective or a personal perspective.
> To put it another way: Telling someone they have a negligible chance of being in an aviation accident is worthless comfort if they end up in one.
Sure. It’s also callous and insensitive, which is why we don’t tend to do that. But saying to the vast majority who are never going to experience a plane crash (a number larger than the number of victims by a few orders of magnitude) that it’s a coin toss is at least not very smart.
(I don't think that's what most mean when they say 'chance', but I get what you mean ;) It's similar to realizing how seating choice radically alters your (very small) chance of death by train crash.
I was going to say 'chance of death on that day' but apparently rail transport is remarkably safe and in micromorts, you're as likely to die in one day at 20 years of age as in 10000 km by rail, or (only!) 1600 km by air.
Now, it appears that 1600 km is also nearly the distance of the average passenger flight (a disappointly difficult datum to discover on the internet in 2024). Is this a counterpart to the reassuring quips comparing the chances of death by lightning: that boarding a plane doubles your chances of dying that day?
This is very silly. There are much better ways to express the idea that a binomial distribution is different than a multinomial or continuous one than to make up fake statistics.
The "excellent evacuation job" is being judged by footage taken from electronic devices. There's obviously at least some utility in these scenarios. The ones on their phones filming what they see outside are probably pretty aware of the situation. If you've crash landed, it would mean nothing that you were distracted on a device. You're not exactly trying to continue watching a movie.
I am perfectly capable of being distracted and inattentive without a phone.
I don't think there's any good way to ensure people are paying attention to the whole long landing and take-off sequence when it's basically always boring.
While there many silly reasons to force people to shutdown electronics and such on planes, I think forcing people to not have any distractions during take-offs and landings is a good thing.
Over 50% of incidents (fatal and hull loss/non-fatal) occurring during landing:
* https://accidentstats.airbus.com/statistics/accident-by-flig...
* https://www.1001crash.com/transport-page-statistique-lg-2-nu...
With take-off and descent/approach being the next two more frequent phases.