Msbbarratt: "We don't really, truly know what's happening, so we'll sample the gearbox condition at every opportunity and maybe find out"
I don't see this as a very constructive comment and feel that this is fundamentally a miss-understanding of aviation and expectations of performance.
While any fatality is a horrendous occurrence I feel that it is important to understand that there is a lot about aviation we, as a species, don't understand.
Firstly, there are no professionals out there who look to put people in danger!
As an industry we are dealing with a truly amazing level of variables and we, as an industry, don't know what we don't know!
More importantly there are whole rafts of everyday aviation based upon best practice, consistency of outcome and historical approaches, we do this because of the law of unintended consequence, specifically if we stray of the established line we will be less certain of the outcome. Unfortunately this means that as an industry we do tend to have to learn a lot of 'new' things as a result of accidents, ideally not fatal ones and as an industry we have what must be the ultimate in hazards that we manage on a daily basis, gravity and it is an unforgiving mistress. So when something new, novel or different occurs we are all very lucky when we learn it without loss of life.
As an industry we model, plan, design, re-design, review those plans and re-designs, train, retrain and retrain some more until we understand our machines as much as is possible. We build test models and prove that they work as best as we can, to the limit of technical knowledge and skill. We then manufacture them and expose them to thermal ranges from -50 degrees to +50 degrees, stress loads that would rip a house apart, moisture, people and a truly vast number of other variables. As a result we can't, hand on heart tell you what we will find in a few years’ time when we pull it apart for a big maintenance check, we can't tell you what will happen if several really obscure failure modes happen at the same time, we can’t guarantee a zero accident rate.
It is this fundamental inability to control the aviation operating environment in its totality that separates us from other disciplines. I have talked with mechanical engineers who are critical of the aviation industry and its perceived inability to produce gearboxes that never fail. Ask them to explain how they would manufacture a gearbox that is a primary part of a large, variable load path, is subjected to a horrible amount of vibration and doesn’t weigh as much as a truck. And if it goes wrong could kill a dozen plus people, I haven't heard a credible answer yet.
Saying aviation shouldn’t have accidents is not an ideology that anyone in aviation would argue with, it is however easier said than done.
On a positive note, we have embraced our deficiencies and compensate. Due to our high levels of regulation and consistency of approach, once a failure mode is established the whole industry has the ability to enact the corrective action to reduce the possibility of re-occurrence in a very short space of time. But we do this one failure mode discovery at a time.
But is the aviation industry every going to be able say 'X will never have an accident'. No, and it is this that needs to be understood. We can only reduce the probability of one happening.
Last edited by Miles Gustaph; 22nd Jun 2016 at 09:53.