DAVID FARBER
2018-08-14 01:54:30 UTC
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Lessons of the Seattle Plane Crash
Date: August 14, 2018 at 10:47:52 AM GMT+9
The Lessons of the Seattle Plane Crash
Itâs not possible to eliminate all risks from modern lifeâbut airlines and regulators work hard to reduce them after each new incident, anyway.
By James Fallows
Aug 12 2018
<https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2018/08/the-lessons-of-the-seattle-plane-crash/567359/>
Modern life is full of potentially terrifying âWhat if?â possibilities. What if a pharmacist decided to substitute morphine pills or strychnine for the next prescription you pick up? What if a school-bus driver decided to swing the wheel, and plow a full load of children head-on into incoming traffic, or off an overpass?
What if a FedEx or UPS courier decided to deliver a box full of explosives, or anthrax spores, to an office building, rather than business supplies? What if a disturbed student, teacher, or parent walked into a public school and opened fire on everyone in sight?
The last possibility is a reminder that there are risks some societies will define as acceptable. All the rest illustrate the reality that our lives hang by threads that someone else could decide to cut. The ability to inflict harm, whether intentionally or accidentally, rises more or less in pace with the technological complexity and interdependence of modern life.
Every modern city dweller depends for daily well-being and even survival on systems that make up the hard and soft infrastructure of society: water, power, sanitation, public health, and on down the list of services no one notices until something goes wrong. Most are run by people we donât know, whose competence and good intentions we have no choice but to take for granted. As for people determined to do harmâthe pharmacist who wants to poison customers, the bus driver intent on suicideâthe only absolute protection would be surveillance and regimentation on a draconian scale. (Want to avoid the risk that any bus driver, ever, could do something rash? Send them all through full FBI criminal-background checks, plus psychological testing, and then staff every bus with both a driver and a co-driver, each to keep an eye on the other. Any school system could do this. None that Iâm aware of does, since it would price bus service out of the realm of practicality.)
Thus sane approaches to security have been careful to set the goal of reducing risks, rather than eliminating them. The first is possible, and it naturally leads to discussions of cost, practicality, and the trade-offs between security and liberty. The second is in most cases impossible, and it naturally invites âsecurity theaterâ-style posturing in fending off threats, and âHow could this have happened???â overreaction when something inevitably goes wrong. (For more of The Atlanticâs case against security theater, especially involving the early years of the TSA, see pieces by Jeffrey Goldberg here, here, and here, and by me here and here. )
So we come to the bizarre, frightening, and tragic episode on Friday night in Seattle, in which a ground-staff baggage employee of a regional airline got into an empty twin-engine turboprop, started it up and took off without permission, flew dramatic aerobatic maneuvers over Puget Sound, and then crashed on an island off Tacoma, killing himself in an apparent suicide.
Bizarre, frightening, and tragic this certainly was. But was it a sign of an alarming failure in security practices, as some press accounts immediately asserted? (For instance, from the United Kingdomâs The Telegraph, soon after the event: âIt has raised fundamental questions about airline security at Americaâs major airports after the mechanic was able to board the plane, taxi onto the runway and take off without being stopped. Aviation experts questioned what the authorities would have been able to do if the pilot was determined to fly the plane into a city rather than do loop-the-loops.â)
Maybe this will be the appropriate response when more facts are known. For the moment, as is usually the case with aviation disasters, many of the most important questions about what happened are impossible to answer right away. Here are some of the aviation details, known and still puzzling, and then my hypothesis as to how this could have happened. (I trained for and got my instrument rating at Boeing Field in Seattle in 1999, and flew frequently in Seattle airspace when I lived there in 1999 and 2000.)
[snip]
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-------------------------------------------Date: August 14, 2018 at 10:47:52 AM GMT+9
The Lessons of the Seattle Plane Crash
Itâs not possible to eliminate all risks from modern lifeâbut airlines and regulators work hard to reduce them after each new incident, anyway.
By James Fallows
Aug 12 2018
<https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2018/08/the-lessons-of-the-seattle-plane-crash/567359/>
Modern life is full of potentially terrifying âWhat if?â possibilities. What if a pharmacist decided to substitute morphine pills or strychnine for the next prescription you pick up? What if a school-bus driver decided to swing the wheel, and plow a full load of children head-on into incoming traffic, or off an overpass?
What if a FedEx or UPS courier decided to deliver a box full of explosives, or anthrax spores, to an office building, rather than business supplies? What if a disturbed student, teacher, or parent walked into a public school and opened fire on everyone in sight?
The last possibility is a reminder that there are risks some societies will define as acceptable. All the rest illustrate the reality that our lives hang by threads that someone else could decide to cut. The ability to inflict harm, whether intentionally or accidentally, rises more or less in pace with the technological complexity and interdependence of modern life.
Every modern city dweller depends for daily well-being and even survival on systems that make up the hard and soft infrastructure of society: water, power, sanitation, public health, and on down the list of services no one notices until something goes wrong. Most are run by people we donât know, whose competence and good intentions we have no choice but to take for granted. As for people determined to do harmâthe pharmacist who wants to poison customers, the bus driver intent on suicideâthe only absolute protection would be surveillance and regimentation on a draconian scale. (Want to avoid the risk that any bus driver, ever, could do something rash? Send them all through full FBI criminal-background checks, plus psychological testing, and then staff every bus with both a driver and a co-driver, each to keep an eye on the other. Any school system could do this. None that Iâm aware of does, since it would price bus service out of the realm of practicality.)
Thus sane approaches to security have been careful to set the goal of reducing risks, rather than eliminating them. The first is possible, and it naturally leads to discussions of cost, practicality, and the trade-offs between security and liberty. The second is in most cases impossible, and it naturally invites âsecurity theaterâ-style posturing in fending off threats, and âHow could this have happened???â overreaction when something inevitably goes wrong. (For more of The Atlanticâs case against security theater, especially involving the early years of the TSA, see pieces by Jeffrey Goldberg here, here, and here, and by me here and here. )
So we come to the bizarre, frightening, and tragic episode on Friday night in Seattle, in which a ground-staff baggage employee of a regional airline got into an empty twin-engine turboprop, started it up and took off without permission, flew dramatic aerobatic maneuvers over Puget Sound, and then crashed on an island off Tacoma, killing himself in an apparent suicide.
Bizarre, frightening, and tragic this certainly was. But was it a sign of an alarming failure in security practices, as some press accounts immediately asserted? (For instance, from the United Kingdomâs The Telegraph, soon after the event: âIt has raised fundamental questions about airline security at Americaâs major airports after the mechanic was able to board the plane, taxi onto the runway and take off without being stopped. Aviation experts questioned what the authorities would have been able to do if the pilot was determined to fly the plane into a city rather than do loop-the-loops.â)
Maybe this will be the appropriate response when more facts are known. For the moment, as is usually the case with aviation disasters, many of the most important questions about what happened are impossible to answer right away. Here are some of the aviation details, known and still puzzling, and then my hypothesis as to how this could have happened. (I trained for and got my instrument rating at Boeing Field in Seattle in 1999, and flew frequently in Seattle airspace when I lived there in 1999 and 2000.)
[snip]
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