r/todayilearned • u/kahlzun • 15h ago
TIL that no fatal accidents have ever occurred with Australian passenger jets; including all flights to/from Australia, as well as all Australian-run companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft150
u/MakkaPakkaStoneStack 14h ago
Yes it's because all Australian pilots have mandatory training in the Fielder method.
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u/kahlzun 14h ago
Many of them can bowl and bat also
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u/SamLooksAt 6h ago
As long as it's not Trevor Chappell training them.
Don't want low altitude warnings.
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u/ErnestScaredBorgnine 15h ago
Qantas never crashed
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u/Academic_UK 15h ago
Gotta go to K-mart
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u/Capnshiner 15h ago
Definitely Qantas
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u/nyc98 14h ago
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u/RedditTipiak 10h ago
fun fact is that airlines censor anything related to plane crashes in films shown during flight to passenger, that includes this very scene... except Qantas which left it in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/yqpdpx/til_in_1989_many_major_airlines_showed_edited/ and I had read it on IMDB as well.
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u/rosstedfordkendall 14h ago
Qantas doesn't fly to LA out of Cincinnati, Ray! You've got to get to Melbourne!
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u/Buttercup4869 15h ago edited 13h ago
I mean, they essentially repaired a *write off to continue claiming that.
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u/epic1107 15h ago
That's not even the only case.
QF32 was pretty close to being a write off
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u/lordtema 14h ago
How that plane didnt crash is a fucking miracle because jesus christ.
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u/kahlzun 15h ago
To be fair, even if they wrote off the bird, nobody got hurt
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u/dirty_cuban 14h ago
That’s very impressive but the claim made by the top level comment was they never crashed, which was demonstrated to be untrue.
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u/no-but-wtf 14h ago
“we’ve never crashed” used to be a huge part of the marketing. I think it was quietly changed to “we’ve never lost a plane in a crash” after that one they should’ve written off.
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u/kahlzun 14h ago
I believe it was a quote from rain man, which had been correct at its time. But yes, depending on how strictly you define crash, one was done by qantas.
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u/Dr_Hexagon 14h ago
at the time Rainmain came out that was true. Qantas has never had a crash that killed anyone on the ground or on the plane, is still true.
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u/s0ner 14h ago
They have had fatal accidents with their pre jetliner planes List of Qantas fatal accidents - Wikipedia
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u/kahlzun 14h ago
Sure, but the most recent one was a literal lifetime ago (75 years)
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u/s0ner 14h ago
Sorry for the confusion, I was replying to Ernest's comment, not your post.
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u/kahlzun 14h ago
No trouble, I did think that was an impressive number either way
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u/Hotchi_Motchi 14h ago
I don't know why this isn't the top comment, Raymond
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u/Pisforpotato 14h ago
Too many kids on Reddit that won't get it. Almost 40 years since the film.
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u/Silent-G 12h ago
Almost 40 years since the film.
Rain Man definitely came out on December 16 1988, definitely a Friday, 13,806 days ago, yeah.
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u/R0TTENART 15h ago
Way to jinx it!
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u/Objective_Aside1858 15h ago
Right? Whatever happens next is on you, OP
(OP, in the highly unlikely event there is an incident, it isn't your fault)
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u/kahlzun 14h ago
I've got a flight in a fortnight, so if Final Destination wants to come at me, thats its opportunity.
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u/TheHoovyPrince 14h ago
Mate i got a flight at the same time we better not be on the same one lmao
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u/kahlzun 14h ago
Sorry cobber, no hard feelings?
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u/flyingkea 13h ago
Don’t you get on my plane! I already get enough shit about how often I break down! (I work for one of the subsidiaries)
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u/KingMobScene 15h ago
Thats where my mind went to.
Now that they've pointed it out, the universe is going to need to balance the scales
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u/HuntersLiberalDong 14h ago
There's a chapter in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books (Outliers I think) about the difference in air crash rates between airlines from different countries/cultures/ethnicities.
He highlights an unexpectedly high incidence of crashes in cultures with high PDI (power distance index), essentially a measure of how much a culture respects authority and hierarchy.
The higher the PDI, the more likely a subordinate, usually the co-pilot, will hesitate to challenge a bad decision or mistake, or they will mince their words when they do, leading to a higher rate of incidents.
The moral of the story is you want an Australian co-pilot who's going to tell the captain he's a fuckwit when he cocks something up.
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u/1nstantHuman 14h ago
We need heeps of Australian copilots
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u/HuntersLiberalDong 14h ago
I think the chapter specifically mentions Irish and Americans if I remember correctly.
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u/michachu 13h ago
And South Korean ones from what I remember, e.g. how they switch to speaking English while piloting the plane to dissociate from their cultural norms more easily.
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u/illepic 13h ago
This is fascinating. Switching languages gives them the blessing to be a cunt.
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u/Chimie45 11h ago
In Korean and Korean culture, not only are there honorific titles, but the actual grammar of how you speak changes based on rank/age/position.
When I was first learning Korean, one of my coworkers posed a question?
Question: The boss wants to get something for lunch that you don't want to eat. How do you properly suggest something else to eat?
Answer: You don't, you eat what the boss suggested.
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u/FireLucid 7h ago
Japanese too.
Person and attendant.
I'd like to book this flight
It will be difficult
I really need to go to this location, do you have any seats?
That would be very hard
Do you speak English?
Yes.
switch to english
Can I book this flight?
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u/horizontalducks 13h ago
Australian are incredibly rule abiding and don’t really care about authority - does seem like a good combo for flying.
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u/sparklinglies 13h ago
The great Australian paradox: we fuckin love a rule as long as it makes sense for the greater good, but will not tolerate authority to live if it comes in the form of arbitrary social deference
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u/BrahCJ 12h ago
I live in WA, and of course there were some vocal fuckwits at the start of Covid, but boy did we care about each other a lot before the government told us we should…. All down hill from there.
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u/__01001000-01101001_ 9h ago
I honestly think this is the best description I’ve heard of a lot of aussies reaction to covid
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u/eroticdiagram 5h ago
Living in South Australia it really felt like during COVID that the US was saying "Boy! You guys are living in a prison over there! They've taken your freedoms and your rights! You're like a third world fascist country!"
And most of us were thinking "We don't want people to die ya fuckwits. Shut the fuck up, cunt. Ignore those dickheads, pass me a mask. You'll be right, grandad."
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u/Who-is-a-pretty-boy 13h ago
That's why we're so easy going. Everyone's following the rules.
We quietly love a good rule
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u/dingodiletti 4h ago
Don’t paint my culture with one brush. I’ll have you know I have overdue Video Ezy rentals from 1998 stored in my shed somewhere.
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u/cannotfoolowls 11h ago
I feel Americans are the opposite with the focus on "freedom"
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u/kahlzun 14h ago
Bartenders too
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u/Unit_79 13h ago
Don’t know where you are, but Aussie bartenders are a dime a dozen in western Canada!
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u/kahlzun 13h ago
There was a joke in a book I read, I forget which, which revolved around the idea that the bartender is always Australian.
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u/pandamarshmallows 13h ago
If you haven’t listened to the If Books Could Kill episode on Outliers, you should. As the hosts pointed out:
To make his point, Mr. Gladwell points to the fact that Korean Air had more accidents in the later half of the 20th century compared to the global average. He counts multiple flights which crashed because they were shot down by Soviet fighter jets, and one which went down because North Korean terrorists bombed it. He mistranslated the Korean in the accident reports which he cites to make it seem like the co-pilots would never bring up problems to their captains because they were afraid to speak up to authorities, which in reality they very often did, and were ignored.
Not accounting for the fighter jets, Korean Air did have an increased accident rate that time, but it was found to be a problem that could be corrected with improved training. Mr. Gladwell even points this out in the book! Airlines from “high-PDI” cultures don’t have higher accident rates generally, it was a problem with Korean Air specifically, which is not a problem anymore.
Frankly I don’t know how anyone takes that book seriously after Mr. Gladwell presents his great thesis about maths scores in East Asia: Asian people are good at maths (racist stereotype) because their ancestors were all rice farmers (racist stereotype), and rice farming requires diligence and persistence (if you say so). Diligence and persistence are useful in maths. Thus, Asian culture, which developed from the rice farming, means that they’re better at maths.
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u/spudddly 8h ago
I believe he's soon releasing an updated version that in which he corrects himself and says Asians aren't good at maths because they eat lots of rice, but because they can focus more easily on mathmatical formulae on a page because their eyes are so slanty.
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u/sunnystand 8h ago
... co-pilots would never bring up problems to their captains because they were afraid to speak up to authorities, which in reality they very often did, and were ignored.
Isn't that then a symptom of the same problem? Whether the co pilot doesn't bring up the issue or if they do but are then ignored has the same outcome.
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u/DampWetFloor 14h ago
So the fact that we don't call our boss' 'sir', means I'm safer while flying? I froth that.
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u/ItchyA123 14h ago
Did you ever watch Glitch on the ABC? I always like the eventual snap of Chris in Season 02 talking to James, his colleague (senior?), “Stop treating me like a fucking idiot!”
The show was great at showing some Aussie cultural differences and that calling out of a colleague and mate is one of them.
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u/DonkeyDingleBerry 13h ago
Your true mates will tell you when you are being a fuckwit. Everyone else will too, but they will be mean about it.
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u/rckid13 13h ago
The higher the PDI, the more likely a subordinate, usually the co-pilot, will hesitate to challenge a bad decision or mistake, or they will mince their words when they do, leading to a higher rate of incidents.
In America there was a massive campaign to try to fix this after United 173 and Tenerife. In both crashes the first officer and or flight engineer were correct but they weren't firm enough in over ruling an incorrect captain.
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u/VulcanHullo 12h ago
The Sullenberger Hudson landing is rated as a famous example of the new training since then, the flight crew did their job, Sully and Skiles worked together with Skiles using his superior experience to know which parts of the Quick Reference Handbook to skip as irrelevant for their situation. Famously the last thing said before the landing/impact was Sullenberger asking Skiles if he had any other ideas (answer: no) which whilst seen as humourous was actively the Captain asking his FO for alternative ideas.
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u/bro_salad 11h ago
This is me finding out his name is Sullenberger. I assumed “Sully” was Sullivan.
No, not because of Monsters, Inc.!
Ok maybe a little bit because of Monsters, Inc.
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u/rckid13 6h ago
United 232 was a classic example too where they used a check airman from the back and the whole crew was trying to come up with a better solution all the way to landing. If you run the United 232 scenario in the simulator it's almost impossible to land the plane any better than they did. That was a situation where even in the best case scenario people were going to die and they managed to land it well enough for many to survive
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u/smurfkipz 13h ago
Makes sense. Kinda like that about our culture actually. We had an old bloke tell the Prime Minister and his news crew to get off his lawn once
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u/Firewolf06 13h ago
Korean Air flight 801 crashed into a hill because the captain was making a mistake and the fo and fe both realized it but tried dropping hints instead of telling him he was wrong because of the hierarchy. 229/254 died.
i work in aviation and safety briefings and whatnot almost always reiterate that we have both the power and responsibility to stop operations for safety concerns. worst case you ask if something is right and they confirm it and you move on. i know some airlines (alaska specifically) offer spot bonuses to anyone who stops ops for a safety concern that turns out to be legitimate, even if it causes a delay/cancellation
"please for the love of god speak up" is a big deal
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u/suid 11h ago
The higher the PDI, the more likely a subordinate, usually the co-pilot, will hesitate to challenge a bad decision or mistake, or they will mince their words when they do, leading to a higher rate of incidents.
This is only one part of what is called "Crew Resource Management" these days. It's not a startling insight from Gladwell, and contrary to what you may read into that bald statement of "power imbalance culture" - that really is not just "human culture" (e.g. religions or regional customs).
E.g. American civilian pilots who came to the commercial airlines from the armed forces in the 50s and 60s had a notorious reputation for being high-handed with junior co-pilots.
After a series of crashes in the 60s and 70s caused by pilot overconfidence, and the inability or unwillingness of the co-pilot ("Pilot Monitoring" in modern parlance, to avoid any suggestion of being "co-" or junior), the FAA and ICAO started pushing CRM on every airline.
It's a set of roles and principles that each pilot is supposed to follow. For instance, just one of the rules is that if the Pilot Monitoring calls for a go-around, you go around, no questions asked.
(Not to say that all of these are being scrupulously followed even today; for example, the Prime Air crash last month was literally pilot over-confidence, and his ignoring of his PM's calls for going around, multiple times.)
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u/itsoktoswear 14h ago
fly around ya fucken drongo or we're as overcooked as a poms barbie
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u/Charming-Standard-84 11h ago
Malcolm Gladwell is trash. His "research" are the most cherry-picked garbage you'd expect from a junior in college.
He's the click bait of "research" and what a dumb person thinks a smart person is.
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u/NKD_WA 15h ago
Is that statistically unusual or just a combination of passenger jets being safe and the number of Australian flights being a small percentage of the total flights ever flown?
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u/birthdaycheesecake9 15h ago
My gut says it’s maybe a combo of all but more of the former two. The flight path between Sydney and Melbourne is pretty busy.
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u/bigfootbjornsen56 15h ago edited 14h ago
One of the busiest in the world. Always pretty much been top 5. Currently it's 6th, but it has been as high as 2nd in 2017 and 3rd in 2018.
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u/trilobyte-dev 13h ago
I notice those stats are by available seats and not by actual passengers flown. Anyone familiar with flight data give some insight on this?
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u/Certainly-Not-A-Bot 13h ago
It's very difficult for an outsider to measure number of seats sold but very easy for an outsider to measure number of seats flown. If we know an airline is flying a lot of large planes, we know they're selling most of those seats because airlines operate for profit and would not fly multiple large planes back and forth if they only have the passengers to fill one
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u/trilobyte-dev 13h ago
Makes sense. Working in data I assumed there would be some reporting or publishing by airlines on flights so I was curious about the explicit callout on the Wikipedia page.
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u/DerSaftschubser 12h ago
They do exist somewhat in SLF statistics, but understandably don't go down to route level in the publicly accesible part
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u/gugabe 13h ago
I feel like Australian weather tends to stick within reasonable bounds as well. Minimal snow, altitude or monsoons/cyclones to deal with for the vast majority of the busy airports. Sure Darwin/Broome get hit occasionally but they're hardly high volume stops.
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u/nagrom7 13h ago
Sure Darwin/Broome get hit occasionally but they're hardly high volume stops.
Also cyclones don't just come out of nowhere, they're usually pretty known at least a few days in advance, and airports close as a result.
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u/DigNitty 14h ago
I wonder if that route also is safer in other ways.
e.g. well defined and consistent flight paths, lots of room to divert if necessary, agreeable flying weather, abundance of emergency landing options, lesser environmental wear on parts, etc.
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u/birthdaycheesecake9 12h ago
It’s a pretty short flight too, but in the event a plane needs to land as soon as possible, Canberra is smack bang in the middle of Sydney and Melbourne by design.
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u/MortimerDongle 14h ago
It's statistically unusual - particularly for the time period before the 90s.
While jet airliners very rarely crash in any country today, especially Western countries, that wasn't nearly as true in the 60s-80s. The number of fatal crashes per million flights today is about 1/10 of what it was in 1980.
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u/joecarter93 13h ago
It’s crazy how much safer air travel has become even since the 90’s and it still was incredibly safe then. There used to be a handful of fatal passenger plane crashes every year. Now, it hardly ever happens.
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u/stefan92293 11h ago
And it gets even more crazy once you realise that the reason planes are so much safer today is precisely because of all those other accidents that came before.
Safety regulations are written in blood.
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u/dovvv 9h ago
Yep, currently browsing through Admiral Cloudbergs brilliant articles, it's staggering how many incidents not only resulted in updated and highly scrutinised regulations, but how seriously the industry worldwide (except for Nepal) takes aviation safety.
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u/epic1107 15h ago
Plenty of Australian flights. Mel to Syd is one of the bussiest flight routes in the world and Australian domestic air travel is huge.
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u/kahlzun 15h ago
Australia is huge, many of the flight routes are thousands of km long
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u/HeftyArgument 14h ago
melbourne to perth is 4 hours, there are many international flights that are shorter than that
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u/pala_ 14h ago
I’m in Darwin. Indonesia is a closer flight than any other Australian capital.
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u/andouconfectionery 13h ago
To be fair, plane crashes correlate much more strongly with departures/arrivals than with VMT. A plane that does the same flight time with double the legs will be much more likely to crash (assuming back to back flights with a defective plane have independent likelihoods of the defect causing a crash. Not accurate, but not too far off I'd imagine.)
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u/Secure_Ant1085 14h ago
Australia has very high safety standards for aircraft.
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u/metahivemind 12h ago
Ain't nobody fucking with CASA, they hunt down the slightest smallest infraction... we're not supposed to have rabies in Australia, but for CASA I ain't so sure.
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u/BuyConsistent3715 15h ago
SYD - MEL is one of the busiest air routes in the world.
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u/Sdog1981 15h ago
Did you just watch Rain Man?
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u/kahlzun 15h ago
I was watching Air Crash Investigators, and thought of Rain Man, and wondered if it still held true, so I went to look up the last major air crash in Australia, and it was a Fokker propeller plane in the 60s.
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u/Sdog1981 14h ago
One of the more interesting things is there has been a commercial airline crash on every continent. Due to a sight seeing tour from New Zealand hitting a mountain in Antarctica.
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u/Dreamiee 13h ago
It's going to blow your mind when you look up the last spider bite death in Australia.
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u/Hotter_Noodle 15h ago
Oceanic 815 disproves this.
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u/Peacevaporwave 14h ago
I wonder what they are doing differently that everyone else should copy
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u/mister_head_cheese 13h ago
My workmates are ex-Australian aviation engineers and they all reckon the safety margins there are overly conservative. Zero jet fatalities is a pretty good argument for overdoing it though.
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u/OnlyRepliesYesOrNo 13h ago
I’ve heard the same thing from an aviation engineer I know. His job is to confirm all planes meet specifications before they leave. He says the stuff you find on planes that arrived from other countries would blow your mind - Loose rivets, sloppy wiring, fuel leaks, it sounds like he’s seen it all.
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u/TittysForScience 11h ago
Australian aviation is one of the most over regulated and reported industries. For a bloody good reason.
It’s something we should never back down from.
The fact that near misses on the ground at Sydney are headline national news is a good thing. I’d rather hear about two planes passing a little too close than a whole Tenerife airport incident…
My parents worked in Australia and international aviation their entire careers. Dad flew for him self (private charters), Ansett, Croatia, Royal Brunei, All Nippon Airways and Tiger Australia. He retired because of Covid and he really misses flying.
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u/karmicviolence 14h ago
The copilot is more likely to call the pilot a twat when he fucks up.
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u/Drop_Release 13h ago
Can confirm that we do not often say twat in Australia (other than in honour of the brits), you’d be more likely to hear that pilot say one of the hundred variants of the f bomb, or the c word
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u/nagrom7 13h ago
That or "dickhead", that's a pretty common one.
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u/flyingkea 13h ago
It’s funny you say that, but we really don’t…
I hate to be the well akshully… person but…They have lessons on how to manage issues in the flight deck. There’s varying levels of escalation, up to and including the FO taking over control (if it was captain flying)
Qantas use what’s called the RAISE model.
The last one “emergency statement” is the only one with anything like name calling - “Captain you must act now!”
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u/Ok-Bill3318 7h ago
Actual maintenance. I’ve also been boarded on a qantas flight and then had to disembark prior to takeoff and take a later flight because the pilot didn’t accept the plane.
Clearly we enable our flight crew to report and act on problems rather than just accept them.
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u/BusyBeeBridgette 14h ago
Qantas certainly has had deaths on their hands with their non jet planes though.
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u/NoHat2957 6h ago
The Australian aviation industry will keep trimming the fat and cutting corners until the inevitable occurs, though, so it's just a matter of time.
As with most things, Australia relies on luck more than best practice, decent regulation or good leadership.
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u/hyzerKite 14h ago
I was just talking about Australian air travel with someone who lived there. We agree it is crazy how smooth it runs there from a passenger experience vs. US. The continent is so vast, and the people so few, that they nailed public transit and domestic air travel long ago, with little margin for error. Australia seems to be so ahead of the US in so many ways, air travel is just the tip of the iceberg. Like schooners, for example.
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u/HardSleeper 13h ago
The public transport in our cities ranges from pretty good to crap depending on where you are in which city, but public transport between said cities is utterly abysmal for a rich western country. Plus having a duopoly of major airlines isn’t exactly amazing for competition…
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u/alb92 13h ago
The few times Australia has had 3 independent airlines (talking ones that have large mainline coverage), the market has not been able to sustain it. There is significant cost to running an airline, and I think many Australians expect a lower price than is practical.
Things have been bad when there isn't even a duopoly (post Ansett or when Virgin just about collapsed).
Vietjet are about to start a new LCC flying domestically (Cherrie Air), so, you'll shortly see a 3rd career, but I struggle to see a scenario that both this airline and Virgin thrive.
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u/chasethislight83 14h ago
Don’t ask about our internet speed.
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u/Longjumping_Radio268 12h ago
This is an outdated meme unless you live in the middle of nowhere
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u/absurditT 8h ago
The Quantas A380 engine explosion was extremely close to causing irrecoverable damage to the jet, btw.
Uncontained turbine failure, debris from the explosion came very close to:
-Destroying the second engine on that wing -Igniting the fuel tanks -Killing passengers in the fuselage -Severing the hydraulic systems
Luckily the debris from the explosion missed basically everything vital and the plane landed safely with nobody hurt. The issue was Rolls Royce's engine design, not the operator or aircraft itself, but having spoken with engineers who worked on the investigation and who fixed the engine design worldwide, it came very close to being one of the deadliest crashes in aviation history. They considered it an extremely close call.
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u/Personal_Ad2455 12h ago
I always thought it was due to high standards. All domestic and international trips had to meet Australian standards. Repairs and maintenance and pilot training. Wasn’t there huge concerns that as repairs and maintenance were now being down overseas that this standard is likely to come down…
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u/egosumumbravir 8h ago edited 1h ago
Don't worry, in order to maximise shareholder returns and executive quarterly bonuses, Qantas is outsourcing all the maintenance to third world countries so eventually, we too will join in on fatal accidents.
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u/Smashed-Melon 14h ago
"Let's push some booze down the aisles and some scenery past the widows"
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u/ActualWhiterabbit 14h ago
Its because everywhere else, if the plane breaks in air then it crashes to the ground. But in Australia, you just keep going away from the ground.
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u/Bozzo2526 11h ago
New Zealand also has a pretty good record but we slammed a plane full of passengers into the side of Mt Erebus in Antarctica that one time