I'm in the final stretch of my ATP rating, I’ve been thinking a lot how we can maximize survival and minimize the likelihood of becoming another aviation news headline. I'm now convinced that we have the wrong mental model. Pilots like the simplicity of categorizing safety by powerplant: “Piston engines fail every 1k–10k hours.” “Jet engines are good for 100,000 hours, and with two of them you will never have to worry about it.” Unfortunately, the real world is very messy, very gray, and very conditional. A much better mental model that will keep you alive is to completely throw away those statistics and build a model for every flight you take. That’s much closer to reality. The conditional probability of any given flight varies greatly. Some flights have a 1-in-10-million survival rate—you would have to repeat that flight 10 million times to have an incident. Some flights, if we’re intellectually honest, are probably terribly low odds, like 1 in 100. Repeat that flight 100 tim...
Aviation. Science. Technology. Environment. and hacking the world.