Originally Posted by
FlexibleResponse
@ATC Watcher
Look at it from the reverse perspective...
On each and every flight, pilots make hundreds or even thousands of safe and correct selections and decisions that prevent a catastrophe and crash killing everybody.
This has to be performed to 100% on each and every flight to be a safe sector without hull loss.
It is only when one of these things is screwed up that an accident ensues...
Its better and worse than that. The potential for a bad day out exists on every flight, it is the human interest in the proceedings that has the potential to rectify issues that occur that were not able to be preprogrammed into a routine. The minor setback is the variability of human performance, and the potential for distraction, undetected errors etc to occur. It is this area that makes flying interesting, and the truth is, that to an extraordinary extent an aircraft with 400 people and cargo on board with immense kinetic energy gets to go from one part of the planet to another, dealing with the vagaries of birds, dogs, scooters, thunderstorms, fog, mechanical failure, computer errors (cosmic or earthly) and the complexity of air traffic management in a system that still has people yelling at each other on HF to get a message across. Humans make errors, many errors every hour of every day. The pilot is being paid to manage error, to review, and correct if mitigation didn't result in avoiding the errors. Selecting the engines to feather is a slip, that happens; realising that the flaps hadn't moved 42 seconds later and then reselecting the flaps, and not wondering what had been moved before is a total loss of SA. The first error is an SA 1 event, followed by an SA 2 event. It is pretty sad, and we keep on doing the same thing still.
Hours in the aircraft do not correlate linearly to safety, something that insurers should comprehend but do not.