Besides, even if you get a premonition about a plane crash, you might as well go ahead and board. If you don’t, Death will just track you down and kill you in a more gruesome way.
What, you never saw “Final Destination?”
I fly 30 or more round trips per year. I never get on an airplane without asking myself “Are these the shoes I want to wear when I wade through twisted metal and burning jetfuel”? I plan every facet of my escape from the wreckage. Every trip I have a premonition of disaster, and so far I am 0 for 1000. But if and when I am right, my last thought will be “I knew it.”
I think that fatal crashes involving commercial airliners are sufficiently rare and freakish events that the explanations of almost all of them tend to involve strings of very unsusual circumstances, unfortunate coincidences, and improbable failures.
I was going to say exactly the same thing.
I second most ofl the reasons brought forward by other dopers, and I’d like to add that they apply even more to trains. Passenger trains are seldom really “full”; even commuter trains during the most crowded peak hours will rarely fill up to 100 % of their capacity. People get on and off at every station, so the probabilities are low that at a given moment, they are really absolutely full, and if there’s peak hour, the operators will start running more trains to meet increased demand. Besides, in many countries where there is considerable passenger traffic on rails (which has become rare in the US, apart from short-distance commuting), the railroad companies are subsidized by the government. They practically never get “full,” and nobody expects them to do so. So it shouldn’t surprise that you rarely hear about accidents involving full trains.
Yeah, generally speaking, they have so many safety regulations and technical safeguards for airplanes (safer to travel by plane than it is to drive to the airport) along with so much training for pilots, that pretty much any accident involves unusual circumstances, if for no other reason than that pilots won’t have experience in dealing with the unusual stuff.
A big factor, from what I’ve seen, is human error, sometimes caused by pilots being distracted by various things, or else just because they made a bad judgement call while trying to balance concerns about the weather with concerns of getting the passengers to where they paid to go. Mind you, there are also many cases of plane crashes being avoided, or greatly reduced in severity, by resourcefullness of the aircrew and people on the ground (there was an airliner I read about that lost rudder and stabilizer control, and they had to steer the plane by playing with the relative thrust of the engines. Still crashed, but in a much less bad manner than it would have otherwise.
You’d be rather amused to see how simulator training for NASA shuttle crews work. Apparantly they have a bunch of sadists in a control room trying to think of what they can have go horribly wrong every 2 or 3 seconds while the flight crew tries to keep up. The theory is, if they train to deal with a Final Destination type scenario all the time, the vast majority of problems they’d actually deal with on a flight would be cake.
That’s awesome. I’m the same way. I have those exact same thoughts every time I fly.
In fact, I don’t travel more than a few yards from the house without a decent pair of shoes that, if needed for some strange reason, I could use for running or climbing. Semper paratus.
Exactly. I see people climbing on airplanes wearing flip-flops for god’s sake. What are they thinking? Do they consider what melted plastic will do to their feet?
Surely it’s just that there’s no fixed number of passengers? Here’s two major rail crashes in London, both of which occured shortly after 8am. Trains get referred to as ‘busy’, ‘rush hour’ (a fairly obvious euphemism), ‘commuter’ and ‘early morning’ (ditto).
You may have read that tidbit in The Stand by Stephen King. Now that I think about it, might’ve been in a conversation of Fran, Harold, Stu and Glen as they were on their motorcycles and headed for Nebraska.
Of course, in the context of a fictional story where Good and Evil battle it out for the souls of mankind, it might have been true. But that’s not the real world.
I do think that there are safety regulations on how many passengers a train may carry. I frequently see plates in train waggons saying how many seats and standing rooms the waggon was licenced for.
I’d recommend looking around the departure lounge. If the other passengers include a pregnant woman, a U.S. marshall escorting a female felon, a very handsome Iraqi guy, a guy in a wheelchair, a Korean couple not on speaking terms, a man and his estranged son, a guy you recognize from a defunct band, a long-haired belligerent guy, a guy who sort of looks like the guy from Party of Five, a woman wearing her husband’s wedding ring around her neck, and a snippy Valley girl and her brother, I’d think twice about getting on that flight. And if a very large guy with big hair comes panting up at the last second, I know I’m not getting on.
Undoubtedly this approach varies…Google turned up this example:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmselect/cmenvtra/30/3007.htm
According to the Wikipedia article you linked, the plane was NOT fly by wire but used conventional mechanical flight controls.