Globalti
Legendary Member
See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7832439.stm
Huge respect to the pilot and his experience, which saved all those lives. I like to see a bit of grey hair on a pilot.
I fly a lot for work and always enjoy it; my great uncle was Chief Designer at BAC at Hurn, he designed the tail of the VC10 and enlarged the BAC1-11 into the Super 1-11, so I've always been interested. I remember watching the maiden flight on the VC10 on Granny's grainy B&W TV and wondering if it would fly....
As it happens I was reading yesterday about aircraft safety, in particular some reports about shoddy maintenance at PIA and the consequences. The whole issue of air crash survivability fascinates me - do you know that you have something like a 1 in 30 million chance of being in a plane crash and even then you have a 50/50 chance of survival, compared to a 1 in 40,000 chance of being in a road accident. Civil aircraft are so incredibly strong and safe, with so many fail-safe systems built in. It's usually human error like bad maintenance or pilot or ATC error, which overcomes these systems and causes an accident. Aircraft safety is a bit like withdrawing your cash from an ATM; you can't get the cash until you have withdrawn your card, which is a simple example of the kinds of safety interlocks built into aircraft.
Huge respect to the pilot and his experience, which saved all those lives. I like to see a bit of grey hair on a pilot.
I fly a lot for work and always enjoy it; my great uncle was Chief Designer at BAC at Hurn, he designed the tail of the VC10 and enlarged the BAC1-11 into the Super 1-11, so I've always been interested. I remember watching the maiden flight on the VC10 on Granny's grainy B&W TV and wondering if it would fly....
As it happens I was reading yesterday about aircraft safety, in particular some reports about shoddy maintenance at PIA and the consequences. The whole issue of air crash survivability fascinates me - do you know that you have something like a 1 in 30 million chance of being in a plane crash and even then you have a 50/50 chance of survival, compared to a 1 in 40,000 chance of being in a road accident. Civil aircraft are so incredibly strong and safe, with so many fail-safe systems built in. It's usually human error like bad maintenance or pilot or ATC error, which overcomes these systems and causes an accident. Aircraft safety is a bit like withdrawing your cash from an ATM; you can't get the cash until you have withdrawn your card, which is a simple example of the kinds of safety interlocks built into aircraft.
