I feel like we as a culture are losing sight of the reality that there is always risk.
346 people in the first year is a horrible. It is also an outlier. In general, flying is extremely safe, and new planes are safe.
If we freak out about everything that ever goes wrong and try to create a system with zero deaths ever no matter what, we risk not being able to do anything new because it is paralyzed by regulation.
It is important to consider, though, that the reason flying is extremely safe is because we do freak out about everything that goes wrong in aviation. Commercial aviation is one industry in which there is a strong correlation between safety and profitability so the industry does freak out over every problem.
Of course, it's a balance, and the balance that commercial aviation has found is heavily focused on safety.
Well you might have a point in that our (global?) culture is becoming less and less prepared for looking reality in the eye.
Yet would one consider mandatory seatbelts and stricter laws on driving under influence and so forth "paralyzing regulation"? You are talking about the other extreme with its polar opposite of not having any rules. But there evidently is a huge middle-ground where we can have regulation and not having people killed in large numbers.
Consequently, if we look at history most of these "freak outs" have in fact resulted in regulation that has saved lives. Eg the gun laws in UK. We as humans are very short-sighted in general and I think it's more of a rule rather than the exception, that we need these kinds of accidents to improve the regulation and the laws in place. Sometimes maybe to the extreme, but I think it's better to be too strict than too lax.
That’s the thing with regulation though, it’s easy to point out some positive effects but you don’t know about all of the societal advancement you may have snuffed out. Climate change could have been a footnote if we didn’t effectively regulate nuclear power out of existence in the name of “safety”.
> Climate change could have been a footnote if we didn’t effectively regulate nuclear power out of existence in the name of “safety”.
Even if 100% of global elextricity generation was replaced with nuclear, that wouldn't be true. You'd have to also replace (for instance) 100% of transportation with nuclear. (And that's assuming that the infrastructure construction and maintenance costs of doing all that are carbon neutral, too, and that the reduced demand and price for fossil fuels resulting from that shift doesn't open up new uses that get you back into problems, which—absent aggressive regulation—youd naturally expect it would.) [55% reduction is CO2 is needed, electricity is 27%, transportation 28%.)
Or maybe you are thinking that the absence of nuclear safety regulation would result in enough accidents to reduce the growth of population and industry enough to solve climate change, which I guess is a valid thought, if an extreme example of glass-half-full thinking.
I generally ask if anyone anymore believes in cause and effect. By and large aviation is safe because of the work of governments and corporations together to create safe aviation. It doesn't just "exist." As we see here with the 737.
> we risk not being able to do anything new because it is paralyzed by regulation.
This isn't frontier science or sending someone to the moon. Aviation can be extremely safe and innovative if based on sound principles and not just trying to make an extra buck.
346 people in the first year is a horrible. It is also an outlier. In general, flying is extremely safe, and new planes are safe.
If we freak out about everything that ever goes wrong and try to create a system with zero deaths ever no matter what, we risk not being able to do anything new because it is paralyzed by regulation.