At 2:30 this morning, near Syracuse, a double-decker commercial bus on the wrong road slammed into a low bridge, killing 4 people. When I read that story, it brought to mind the asinine statement by Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, who thinks that his airplanes only need one pilot.
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Maude
I heard the statment abou the no more co pilot and couldn’t believe it. The automation is no help if there’s a dead pilot and no one to push the right button.
This whole thing of safety doesn’t matter seemspervasive. Maybe it’s me, but it is dehumanizing to put safety second, third or lower on the list of importance. Profit first.
We saw how well that worked out in 2008 with the finacial sector.
Same with union bashing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Maude: In my view, there has been an increase in denigrating skill and expertise of the last few years. Anti-intellectualism is a part of it, but, if you look at Matt Yglesias and ED Kain and their views on barbers, it is part of the same thing. People seem to think that, because they could do x in many standard situations, x is easy to do. What they fail to realize is that x can get very complicated very quickly, and, in such a situation, an expert is the only person qualified to handle the problem. At the same time, lack of expertise prevents people from realizing that there might be complications lying just below the surface that make their situation far more difficult than they realize. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, pilots, plumbers, and barbers exist as professions/skilled trades for reasons other than rent-seeking.
Anoniminous
Would be entirely too Left Wing DFH to write modern Business Management exhibits the intelligence of a chicken and the ethics of a shark during a feeding frenzy.
Arclite
That’s my favorite REM song…
Sad about the accident. Yeah, I don’t think I’d fly an airline without a copilot, unless they had 10 years of data showing there was no difference in safety statistically.
THere’s also talk of removing pilots completely and having the autopilot fly the plane. This is interesting, as the cause of many accidents are pilot error, but on the other hand, the creative action of pilots have saved many lives, like the guy who landed in the Hudson river, or the pilot whose landing gear failed and oh-so-gently put the plane down on the runway with no injuries. Again, getting the stats on that will be the determining factor, but I can’t imagine something like that before 20 more years.
I’ve always thought that eventually computers would drive our cars and planes for us. It’s just a matter of time to perfect the hardware and software, but perfecting the systems, proving their safety, and overcoming the emotional reactions to taking control away from humans will take a lot of time.
Amanda in the South Bay
@oo
All true, but there are major qualitative differences between being a barber and being an airline pilot (again, noting that cutting hair can be an honorable and demanding occupation). I think the barber example was poor, because you had all these people arguing contra Kain and Yuppie Yglesias, in a tad bit of going overboard, how dangerous, etc it was. I mean, you don’t need a masters in chemical engineering and a biohazard team standing by when you cut hair.
cmorenc
It’s true that you also don’t really need to bring a parachute to jump out of an airplane safely. In fact, you don’t need one at all until you are about two feet from hitting the ground.
You also have no need for brakes on a car, unless you happen to need to stop faster than you’d coast to a stop.
ant
new york has a funny way of measuring bridges. It’s different than every other state, so it’s easy to get confused.
They measure from the curb or something, whereby a sign that means you’re gonna hit in every other state, don’t mean that in ny.
Having said that, any parkway is low bridges in NY state. Any truck driver in the US could tell you that.
Maude
@Omnes Omnibus:
You said it so well. I think it’s an aspect of living in what I call fantasyland. These are people who are sheltered and protected. Everything is made easy for them They have no concept of skill, labor, or learning.
I look at peoples hands, not as a nosy parker, but sometimes I notice a woman’s hands that have not seen a minute’s work.
I said to a woman who was working at the register where I bought cleaning products that she had working hands and that I have working hands. The woman who takes me to the store also has working hands.
You can say it better than I can, but with the advent of Reagan’s mediocrity is fine, it’s become a scary country.
Fantasylanders are dangerous to the rest of us because they don’t care.
Thanks for the post mistermix.
Omnes Omnibus
@Amanda in the South Bay: It is a matter of degree, not kind. There is a tendency to judge a profession or skilled trade by the easy everyday tasks. I am a lawyer; I know, for example, that someone could write a will leaving their property to their adult children in equal shares with aid of a book the check out of the library. This will would probably serve its purpose. The moment, however, you get much more complicated than that, a lawyer becomes advisable. I also know that I am capable of replacing the u-bend pipe thingie under my bathroom sink on my own with the aid of tools I possess. The moment a plumbing situation gets much more complicated than that, a plumber is advisable.
New Yorker
BusinessWeek just had a profile on O’Leary. He seems like your typical obnoxious attention-seeker. It’s one thing to be, say, Mark Cuban and run a sports franchise while having a big mouth. If the Dallas Mavericks screw up, nobody dies.
O’Leary should just be ignored by the media. I’m fortunate to live in the states and not have to fly Ryanair. It was amusing to see a side-by-side comparison in the B-Week article of the costs and timing of a flight from London to Munich on Ryanair vs. British Airways, considering how pleasant it was for me to fly on British Airways from London to Munich and back again 2 years ago. I don’t think I’d risk it on Ryanair.
DougJ
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not to be a circle jerker here but all ED did was heh-indeed Yglesias’s stupidity. It isn’t quite fair to treat him as an equal accomplice.
scav
My immediate thought is that somebody maybe out of cheapness or ignorance used a generic routing tool (say, Google / Mapquest / Bing et al) rather than the expensive ones that build their routes taking into account bridge / overpass heights and truck restrictions. And then, because the bloody computer provided the route, the driver just followed it without paying much attention to the actual road and . . . wetware automation fail demonstrated. True, a toaster could have made that error for less, so let’s put them in the driver’s seat.
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJ: OK, let’s put an asterisk next to his name.
MikeJ
@DougJ: Why not? He agreed. Sure he didn’t write the first post, but presumably it reflects his thinking.
You’re not any smarter if you agree with a stupid idea instead of thinking it up.
DougJ
@MikeJ:
Maybe you guys are right.
I thought the larger discussion around that topic was fine, though, just that Yglesias example was lazy and glibertarian.
My spell check changes glibertarian to libertarian. Heh.
Jennifer
Not sure it matters; as Michael Moore revealed years ago (in which book or movie I can’t recall), most pilots are low-wage workers these days. He talked with one guy who was on food stamps. On those small regional flights, average pilot salary was something like $19K and the average age of the pilot was very young. I know this has been going on because the neighbor kid was drafted at age 19 to be a commercial pilot some 12 years ago; I can also tell you that the time he spent between entering training and going to work was frighteningly short, something on the matter of a few months.
Which means that a growing number of commercial pilots fall under the rubric of that old right-wing saw about teachers: “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” or in this case it would be, “those who can’t, fly.” When you get on an airplane these days, odds are pretty good that you’re putting your life in the hands of a guy who’s flying the plane because he doesn’t know how to do anything that will pay him better.
(Note: no offense to pilots in general – more a critique of an industry trend.)
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJ:
The reverse would be funnier.
Janet Strange
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t think I’ll ever see a better one than what my several editions ago MS Word did to “creationism.” Wanted to change it to “cretinism.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Janet Strange: I don’t really see the difference.
MattR
Sorry, but I just don’t see any connection between the two items. It seems like Mistermix thinks driver fatigue was the issue for the bus (though I am not sure), but I don’t think anyone has been making the argument that we need two pilots on short flights due to fatigue.
NobodySpecial
How many pilots are needed for the planes of a bankrupt airline? Probably less than two.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
When they had the commentary around the bus strike a few years ago, G had a rant asking who people would rather have driving a bus through heavy midtown traffic in rush hour: an experienced professional who’s been doing it for 20 years or a college kid on summer break?
It really does seem to be a denigration of work that doesn’t require you to sit in an office all day, so therefore it’s not REAL work and any idiot could do it. When we had the big grocery strike here, people were complaining about grocery workers getting health insurance and sick days. Because God forbid that the people handling your food be able to see a doctor and take a few days off when they have the flu rather than having to work and spreading it to the entire store.
mistermix
@MattR: It’s not just fatigue, it can be regular old error. The bus driver took the wrong road after leaving Syracuse and hit a low bridge at what looks like highway speed. Though there are plenty of examples of two pilots making the wrong decision (for example, in Lexington, KY, neither noticed they were taking off from the wrong, too-short runway), I have to assume that the second set of eyes in the cockpit has saved many lives over the years.
boilerman10
Mistermix,
There are at least 4 signs on the Lake Parkway warning of a 10 foot 6 inch clearance bridge.
It’s a railroad bridge that has been there for about a century.
The bridge is a traditional, heavily built, girder style bridge, and many a truck and tall load has come to grief there.
No amount of signage seems to help.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
__
Quoted for Truth. There’s an old parable — which may have dropped out of the common memory — about the doctor who calls a plumber at 3am because his toilet isn’t working. The plumber comes over, looks around for a few minutes, takes a big hammer and whacks a particular pipe joint really hard… and the toilet flushes. The doctor could not be happier — until the plumber tells him “That’ll be $200.”
“Two hundred dollars? ! ?” says the doctor. “Just for banging on a pipe? I went to medical school and I don’t get $200 for ten minutes’ work! I demand an itemized, written invoice!”
So the plumber goes out to his truck, rummages around for a piece of paper, and brings back his itemized invoice:
— Hitting pipe with special hammer: $25
__ Twenty years’ training & experience to learn where to hit which pipe: $200.
It’s been convenient for the Masters of Our Universe to forget how much of life relies on the ten thousand small people who know which pipe to hit. But they’re the first to complain when the toilet won’t flush.
Seitz
Honestly, when a double decker bus crashes, you should really use a Smiths reference, not an REM reference. This rule also applies to situations in which a ten ton truck kills the both of us.