Give up flying?

[landsurfer]

We always take a picnic from home when we fly .... in May we flew to Tenerife with the children and got looks of jealousy from those sat around us as we took the sandwiches, crisps etc from our hand luggage, our drinks where purchased airside but the food came from our kitchen.
We made stuffed flatbreads for the return journey . .. absolutely no reason not to take a picnic with you on the plane. We always eat the lot or dispose of in the planes rubbish system as there can be restrictions on importing some foods ... but not if their inside your gut ..

[landsurfer]

My wonderfully incisive and humorous (!) comment about Saint Greta seems to have been disappeared ......
Is any criticism or naysaying about the Golden Child banned on this forum ?

You may or may not have noticed that I hinted that Greta might get seasick (as I was) - although I was careful to make clear that I didn't wish that upon her. Seasickness may be unpleasant, but it's not usually life-threatening.

Your post, on the other hand, expressed the wish for a far worse fate upon her, without any caveats. Over to you to explain.

Greta .. take your protests to China, India even .... stand up against Germany's continuing fossil fuel via thermal coal usage .... but most of all to China .... or are there easy, more comfortable ... and safer, targets to posture around ..... grow up girl ....

[Oldjohnw]

Well done, Greta, for showing such an example!

[reohn2]

Well done, Greta, for showing such an example!

Hear,hear!

[reohn2]

My wonderfully incisive and humorous (!) comment about Saint Greta seems to have been disappeared ......
Is any criticism or naysaying about the Golden Child banned on this forum ?

You may or may not have noticed that I hinted that Greta might get seasick (as I was) - although I was careful to make clear that I didn't wish that upon her. Seasickness may be unpleasant, but it's not usually life-threatening.

Your post, on the other hand, expressed the wish for a far worse fate upon her, without any caveats. Over to you to explain.

Greta .. take your protests to China, India even .... stand up against Germany's continuing fossil fuel via thermal coal usage .... but most of all to China .... or are there easy, more comfortable ... and safer, targets to posture around ..... grow up girl ....

She is growing up,and into a fine world citizen too at the rate she's going!

My 10 year old granddaughter is similarly inclined,like a growing number of children.
Every morning before school she takes the dog for a walk along with a plastic bag a gloves to pick up litter as she goes,litter that some of the less grown up people drop,she's never short of litter to pick
She's a fine example to the rest of us.

BTW I believe China produces less Co2 per individual than the UK,I'm not sure about Germany though,perhaps you have some figures?

[kwackers]

Greta .. take your protests to China, India even .... stand up against Germany's continuing fossil fuel via thermal coal usage .... but most of all to China .... or are there easy, more comfortable ... and safer, targets to posture around ..... grow up girl ....

You know that China is not only meeting it's climate change targets but beating them? It met it's 2020 targets three years ahead of schedule and it's on target to hit peak CO2 10 years earlier than predicted and that's despite being the manufacturers for the world.

Us on the other hand are merely keeping pace and it's increasingly unlikely we'll meet our 2023-27 target.

Why folk keep banging on about China I've no idea, they pour far more money into clean energy than we do even per capita.

When folk are fitting Chinese solar or wind or driving Chinese EV's or riding Chinese sourced ebikes they'd do well to recognise why spending money on R&D is a good thing.

[Mike Sales]

I'm jealous of Greta. I would love to cross the Atlantic in a rocket ship like that.

"Johnny, clean up your room."
"Won't, my brother's room is a mess. It's not fair. Why don't you shout at him and leave me alone?"

[Carlton green]

it’s not as safe as I’d like it to be

Errr, how safe do you want it to be?

0.07 deaths per billion miles makes it the safest way to travel bar none - and massively safer than a bicycle.

Good question. Essentially there is a very high degree of safety awareness in the build, maintenance and use of aircraft but there is also massive commercial pressure too and - as we see from the VW emissions scandal - commercial pressure sometimes does override doing the right thing. I’d like commercial pressure to never influence safety and certainly never override it.

Problems with the recent 737 Max indicate to me that that design has flaws in it that should never have got past the FAA and there is now some question about how (too) close the manufacturer and the FAA where. I have doubts about the sense of maxing any design too and the BBC did an interesting article on that and other issues: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/id ... ly_crashes .

When aircraft fall out of the sky there is typically a very high casualty rate and the passengers are completely helpless, their fate is in the hands of others who typically are very able and qualified however that’s not always enough. Aircraft are exceedingly complex devices and as such an accident waiting to happen, they are also open to abuse by others hence airport security and the occasional one being hijacked or shot down. It’s true that in practice the risk is very small but as the outcome is very bad I choose to avoid taking the risk of flying when I can.

In the case of flying I don’t feel that the safety rate per mile gives a completely fair comparison, a rate of casualty per journey would be a better indicator. Whilst statistics are wonderful things but as some famous people have said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

[Carlton green]

My wonderfully incisive and humorous (!) comment about Saint Greta seems to have been disappeared ......
Is any criticism or naysaying about the Golden Child banned on this forum ?

You may or may not have noticed that I hinted that Greta might get seasick (as I was) - although I was careful to make clear that I didn't wish that upon her. Seasickness may be unpleasant, but it's not usually life-threatening.

Your post, on the other hand, expressed the wish for a far worse fate upon her, without any caveats. Over to you to explain.

Greta .. take your protests to China, India even .... stand up against Germany's continuing fossil fuel via thermal coal usage .... but most of all to China .... or are there easy, more comfortable ... and safer, targets to posture around ..... grow up girl ....

‘Grow up girl’? Gosh, those are harsh words aren’t they? The girl’s just 16 and shows remarkable responsibility for someone of her age.

I would agree with you that Germany (who are normally very green) have questions to answer about their use of fossil fuel (local people think so too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48734321 ) and as far as I know they are working towards greener power generation. I would also agree about India and China being both massive polluters and hard targets, however whether Greta would have any influence on those countries is questionable so let her work where her skills are best utilised.

Ongoing pollution in Western Europe is, I believe, small in comparison to the likes of China but the way that we address it can provide useful examples to other countries and assist those who take responsibility for improving the situation.

[kwackers]

In the case of flying I don’t feel that the safety rate per mile gives a completely fair comparison, a rate of casualty per journey would be a better indicator. Whilst statistics are wonderful things but as some famous people have said: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

As I said above I appreciate what folk are trying to do but a "per journey" casualty rate isn't that useful either.
Why?
Because you simply don't make that many journeys.
I make hundreds of bicycle journeys every year and very few (sometimes none) journeys by plane. So at the very least you need to multiply your "casualty per journey" rate by the number of journeys taken and it still comes out in favour of the plane by a large margin.
If you throw in serious injuries too then the plane is safer by several orders of magnitude.

As an aside, stuff like the 737 happens occasionally, there'll be an investigation into the FAA, wrists will be slapped and assuming Trump is no longer in charge then changes will be made.
The VW scandal is a case in point - try buying a new diesel that cheats. You can't!
Sometimes bad stuff needs to happen to keep things on the straight and narrow.

[Carlton green]

Sometimes bad stuff needs to happen to keep things on the straight and narrow.

Well that might be true but I tend to work on preventing problems first rather than reacting to them later. Some safety conscious industries use near miss procedures and critical event reporting to alter what they do such that ‘accident’ frequency is reduced. Anyway we digress from the core of the thread so perhaps we should return to it now.

[Hobbs1951]

I've done a great deal of flying long distance, business and leisure over the years, and have no need to fly long distance anymore. If we can't drive or get there by train we don't go there.

John.

[kwackers]

Well that might be true but I tend to work on preventing problems first rather than reacting to them later. Some safety conscious industries use near miss procedures and critical event reporting to alter what they do such that ‘accident’ frequency is reduced.

And that's how flying works.
In the UK at any rate you're supposed to file an Airprox.
Airprox's are one of the mechanism commercial pilots use to report drone use and why we introduce drone controls despite there being no accidents recorded.

For your amusement the police were doing speed checks near me on a 20mph road, it was reported on the local FB page and one person ranted the usual about 20mph being too slow etc but they also suggested that since nobody had been killed on the road that perhaps the speed limit should be raised.
So for some at least reducing safety until you reach the point someone dies is acceptable.

[661-Pete]

I don't think flying has suddenly become less safe: we all hope, I suppose, that the 737-Max disasters were a one-off, or rather two-off. But in aviation even a one-off disaster is one disaster too many. Are Boeing and/or FAA going to face charges on 346 counts of corporate manslaughter? I seriously doubt it.

Apparently the much-derided MCAS system on these aircraft, designed to autocorrect situations where the aircraft is believed to be climbing too steeply, relies on input from a single sensor. If that sensor fails, the MCAS becomes unreliable but still cannot be over-ridden - or at least the pilots were not properly instructed on how to override it. Is that any way to design an aircraft?

Very early on in my software engineer career, I was, for my sins, briefly working in the Defence industry, on the avionic firmware for a military aircraft. I had a very marginal involvement, and I don't remember much about the system. I do remember (and I think I can say this without getting into trouble!) that all the safety-critical sensor inputs - those for which a failure might lead to a crash - were triplexed or quadruplexed. In other words, the inputs from three or four different sensors were 'voted' and only acted upon if they agreed with one another.

I suppose a failure of a military aircraft in flight might lead to a battle being lost. The failure of two civil aircraft in flight led to the loss of 346 innocent lives. Which is worse?

But I'll still fly if I really have to. Just not in a 737 Max - and preferably not in any Boeing.

[Cugel]

Greta .. take your protests to China, India even .... stand up against Germany's continuing fossil fuel via thermal coal usage .... but most of all to China .... or are there easy, more comfortable ... and safer, targets to posture around ..... grow up girl ....

You know that China is not only meeting it's climate change targets but beating them? It met it's 2020 targets three years ahead of schedule and it's on target to hit peak CO2 10 years earlier than predicted and that's despite being the manufacturers for the world.

Us on the other hand are merely keeping pace and it's increasingly unlikely we'll meet our 2023-27 target.

Why folk keep banging on about China I've no idea, they pour far more money into clean energy than we do even per capita.

When folk are fitting Chinese solar or wind or driving Chinese EV's or riding Chinese sourced ebikes they'd do well to recognise why spending money on R&D is a good thing.

The Surfer is doing naughty early morning trolling. Still, it's lightweight trolling and an opportunity to tell him orf concerning his gleeful fuel-splurging. THERE, you naughty Surfer - consider yourself as having had a strong tut at your wasteful antics, not to mention that "make 'em jealous of my sandwich" trick. I hope you are now suitably remorse.

Cugel, in prefect mode.