Current state of the US airline infrastructure 2025
 

An honest question from a SLF. I ask this completely non-politically, and I do not want to start any sort of political analysis or discussion. But I specifically would love to hear from you who wake up every day and work to move us from one place to another through the air.about what you think of the current and immediate future of the commercial airline industry. That includes your experiences with ATC, and airline operations in general.

1. Do any of the recent incidents in North America have anything to do with infrastructure issues or is it just an unfortunate lining up of the holes in the Swiss cheese?
2. Do you think flying in the US is more or less safe than it was say, ten years ago?
3. Or is much of this the usual chorus of clickbait and headline chasing.

Thanks.

Interesting questions, Which I di not think anyone can yet answer Let's wait a bit more to see if it is a pattern or just a anomaly. .

On infrastructure , I can.t talk about the airline industry in the US, not my area of expertise , but on ATC I can give you my opinion : it is antiquated , roughly still using 1980-90 technology , was never properly modernized , and it still massively lacks staff , certified ,controllers that is .
, Solutions? , on systems : one would be to privatize the Service provision (ATM) , it was attempted a couple of years ago but the AOPA lobby killed the idea. Modernize to 2025 technology ? , means a huge budget, and building new Ops rooms in each of the large facilities, , train people on it while in parallel running the old system . For this you need lots of extra staff , which they do not have , Doing this without extra staff would mean drastic restrictions on traffic during years, not weeks. Can't se that happen either.
Only way out , first massively recruit and train large number of controllers, while building the new infrastructure .with modern technology . in 10-12 years you might get there , if you are lucky.

Oh please. Let's not wait.

The statistics of the occurrence of rare events (search for Poisson distribution) is a complex subject. And not easily understood by those not versed in the mathematics. It can take a significant sample of these to determine whether or not there is an underlying change in the driving datasets. And since these events sometimes manifest in the form of significant losses of capital equipment and lives, can we afford to sit around and count them?

The aviation industry (at least back in my time) preferred to do a root cause analysis on each one with the goal of eliminating the cause. Even if that meant pushing the economics of the fixes to the back seat. Just to see if things would regress back to the mean or not.

There are mechanisms in place to capture near misses and use this data to extrapolate to the expected frequency of more significant events. With the goal of identifying underlying adverse system changes and fixing them before the next big tragedy. Again, this is a complex statistical problem in that rare events can cluster and give the appearance of trouble when none really exists. I hope that the FAA and NTSB have some smart math geeks concentrating on this data.

The Swiss Cheese model has nothing to do with whether accidents occur in clusters.

They don’t.

Only SLF but I'm getting the impression that compared to the rest of the world:
Some incidents seem to be occurring when there are very few layers of cheese (≥1?). But they also seem to be surprisingly small holes.

Your less layers with smaller holes is a good analogy , but in the US ( and elsewhere , not limited to the US, Africa is also a good place where this occurs too) ) the size of the holes are reduced by human intervention rather than rules and procedures . hence you allow more elements of risk but move more traffic .. Here "expedition" takes over the "orderly" in the ICAO definition .

You can also extrapolate this outside aviation ,like the financial sector for instance, where less regulations = more possibilities but greater risk .

True. That's the 'how' of analyzing systems. The 'lets wait and see' is the 'when' you get around to looking for an underlying change in the systems. Or an overlooked Swiss cheese hole