blancolirio on YT gives more timely but objective (i.e., tries to stick to the latest facts) takes on aviation incidents. There will be a fair bit of speculation still...
He made a quick video on this one, but just listing questions we don't have answers to yet, and warning that there will be plenty of speculation. I expect he will have several follow ups as more facts come up.
Yes. Unfortunately this year alone will give him quite a backlog. Every month there's been a couple of disasters or near disasters and there's no apparent connection between any of them.
I can mostly only speak for my own industry (software engineering), but subjectively, it seems like we lost a lot of institutional knowledge as well as organizational structures through Covid that will take a while to rebuild.
Between people going into early retirement (I heard aviation was hit particularly hard by this), people changing careers and their replacements not having much in-office spin up time etc., and some industries/markets never returning to in-person work at all when it used to be common before, I have some theories on where we lost both.
I haven't by any means been keeping count but it does feel like there have been a lot more incidents that usual this year, and certainly a lot more fatalities.
What I can't work out whether that's recency bias, or because I've been watching a lot of MentourPilot with our daughters so I'm simply more attuned to this kind of news, or if there really are more of them.
I certainly don't know if the rate of incidents per passenger mile flown is higher than usual.
No, it's not worse. If you look through the list of deadly plane accidents, the last year has been average (4 vs. 3 avg).
Since the deadly DCA collision in January, there are things making the news now that would never have in the past, so it seems like it's worse. Especially if the plane has "Boeing" written on the side. For example, hitting animals, tire blowouts, or ground equipment bumping into planes, which grounds them for inspection. When I worked for a major airline, those things are all actually pretty common and happen everywhere, all the time.
It's just a method used to stoke fear and feed clicks.
People find the most minute thing to complain about. Recently, there was an article about the antiquated FAA system using floppies. While the system is old and showing it's cracks, saying it uses floppies just makes it sound worse then it is. As of 2020, our mx crew were still plugging a Windows 98 laptop with DOS into Embraers and Bombardier Dash8s, and used floppies in Boeings (no Airbus or ATRs in our fleet for comparison).
There is a media difference though since the DCA crash. Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January. My point is the same, media sees crash, tries to drive clickage.
On a personal level, I know three people that have died in small plane crashes in the Alaska wilderness in the last 15 years, which is so common that it didn't even get on local news. I have acquaintances that were in involved in two others elsewhere over the last few years. Small planes are unbelievably dangerous. Commercial jets, not so much.
Small planes are about twice as safe per mile as motorcycles, all-cause to all-cause.
Now, there’s planes running out of fuel and drunk driving on cycles that some operators might choose to exclude from their own risk calculations, but it’s a little over one order of magnitude riskier than cars.
Whether that’s unbelievably dangerous is up to personal judgment.
> Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January.
We don't hear about military jet crashes unless they're F-35s. The controversial jet gets coverage because it gets eyeballs from people satisfying their confirmation bias. These are never put into context of course.
> The F-16 has been involved in over 670 hull-loss accidents as of January 2020.[312][313]
Fighter jets are simply dangerous, period. They're meant to be flown right at the bleeding edge, accidents are inevitable. But every time an F-35 crashes, the media makes a big deal out of it and idiots see that as confirmation of their belief that the F-35 is bad. Even if the F-35 is bad, it crashing sometimes wouldn't be evidence of that. Occasional crashes are just what happens when fighter jets get flown a lot. It's going to happen whether the jet is good or bad.
Having flown tactical jets off an aircraft carrier into Afghanistan . . . you seem to be conflating "dangerous" with "inherently unforgiving." Flying jets in combat against a peer foe is dangerous. Flying them in peacetime is inherently unforgiving. "Dangerous" occurs when I as an aviator can be taken out by something not under my control or that of my pilot or fellow aircrew.
The reason verbiage matters is because many people fear flying because they look at it as some kind of gamble as opposed to something where risks can be mitigated down quite a bit by the act of being safety-conscious. Even flying multi-plane low-levels or opposed large force exercises are not "dangerous" per se, so long as everyone plays by the rules and takes it seriously. Civil aviation is so safe because of a culture of making it safe.
9/11 showed us the damages of a plane crash with a full load of fuel can do and goes to show why dumping fuel is part of the procedures when planes are coming inf for a landing under "strained" conditions.
Fuel dumping is overwhelmingly to prevent or minimize an overweight landing and subsequent brake/tire overheating and inspections. It’s got not much to do with minimizing fuel-fed fire after impact.
I hope he makes $20k. Or more. I enjoy his content and the insight he brings.
Also many people make money from the tragedy of others. Morticians, coffin builders, clean up crews, construction workers, concrete companies…I could probably come up with 100 more examples.
Just because their work is from the result of something tragic doesn’t mean it is any less important.
Being completely frank he does a very good thing. He's got through to our eldest about how important it is to do things correctly, and be systematic and detail oriented, in a way that her mum and I have really struggled to.
The irony of it is that a couple of months back I was sat in the living room watching MentourPilot, she came in and asked what I was watching, said "Ugh, boring!" Then she sat down and started playing on our Switch... and then she just got sucked in to the episode, and is now completely obsessed with watching MentourPilot. She often knows what's gone wrong and what the pilots should have done instead before he even explains it.
So the guy's all right with me and absolutely welcome to make as much money as he can: he's a great educator.
Most of his videos are on crashes. He has said he won't speculate on active investigations, but has already done videos on what is known, and preliminary reports.
You're either misremembering or misunderstood something, or I'm not understanding what you mean, because Mentour Pilot literally has a channel with nothing but air crash investigation videos: https://youtube.com/@mentourpilot
He has one of the best air crash investigation journalists, Kyra Dempsey (aka Admiral Cloudberg) as one of the writers on the channel.
They already have a YouTube Short listing the facts of the crash, and also have a longer video about the Jeju one. Only the facts, no speculation - they're waiting for the preliminary or even final report to make a full in depth video on it.
You're upset that he's benefiting by providing an expert perspective on a topic you're interested in?
Boy, you must be upset about pretty much everything on the internet. Except for hn. Paul Graham just runs this site out of his own benevolence, nothing else.
He is actually really good. By far the best on YouTube. The quality is so high (because it's based on technical reports), you can learn something from it as a professional engineer.
MentourPilot is not exactly the only YouTuber going off of actual technical reports, and I did not question his accuracy — I said I find him "grating". I'd rather watch old Mayday episodes than MentourPilot — Greg Feith, for one, is a great communicator. John Cox, too.
I find his content over-produced. As in, he puts too much effort into the production instead of just dispensing the information. I like Kelsey from 74-Gear and Juan Browne for their down to earth delivery. But that's what makes YouTube great having so many choices.
Horrifying that it came down in a residential area with almost all its fuel still on board though. The aftermath is beyond belief.