I’ve been working in the airlines since age 25, starting at a commuter in Galion, Ohio. It’s been a great ride with a lot of fine people who taught me many things. Before that, I flight instructed and had a brief stint flying and working as an installer for a pew-padding company. Talk about variety!
There is some still low hanging fruit on the tree of airline safety that mostly involves automation playing a bigger role. Not even necessarily in flying the aircraft, but in providing intelligent warnings. I’ll periodically explore that here.
I get it, vision deteriorates with age. But we don’t put braille in cockpits, and in fact, airline pilots must demonstrate 20/20 vision at least every year. So it was with some amusement that I noticed the N-Number on this particular 737. Notice how BIG it is! Admittedly, I’m not fond of having to search […]
Continue ReadingIt’s an unsavory but necessary calculation. What’s a life worth? Let’s say we can save 1000 lives by requiring airlines to spend a billion dollars. That makes the cost per life saved (1B / 1000) $1 million. What about a safety initiative that only costs $100 million but only saves 10 lives? That’s (100M / […]
Continue ReadingBoeing said it’s building an airliner intended for only one pilot. Is that a good idea? In short: not yet. The technology itself is essentially there but not at the reliability that we need. It’s about 90% there but there’s a lot of devil in the last 10% of detail. And there are other problems. […]
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