That’s probably part of it but it’s not the whole story, at least not according to Perrow.
Presumably airborne radar also has other benefits for the airlines. Perhaps being better able to avoid the worse weather makes the flights more efferent and so forth.
If the top tier airlines agree that installing something like airborne radar is a benefit to their operation they can tell the regulators they will not push back against new regs. That forces all the competitors to purchase/install/train as well so they are not at a competitive disadvantage relative to the other airlines who may be willing to accept higher risks.
On the maritime side an example is the requirement to carry ECDIS. . Could the IMO have forced EDCIS requirements ship owners had they not wanted it? Running with an ECDIS has a lot of advantages besides safety.
Same story, making the requirement a regulation means the competitors must purchase it also and ensures institutional support (training facilities, documents etc)
Not really - one too many airplanes with paying passengers crashed in thunderstorms and the FAA dropped the hammer. Airlines were really not jumping up and down eager to buy expensive gear for the hell of it.
The deal is if the FAA says “Radar makes airplanes safer” the general public is riding on those very airplanes and will demand it.
If the USCG says “Radar makes tugboats safer” only people dodging tugboats in the fog care, which is a small subset of the general public.
note to non-pilots, aircraft radar is primarily for avoiding weather, sometimes for ground mapping, and really doesn’t show other airplanes. (in pre-GPS days I could use it to see the Bahamas cays while over a cloud deck and follow along on the chart)
I’ve had ECDIS save my ass years ago. At the most opportune time, a heavy squall and microburst type conditions hit me in a channel. The rain was so thick that radar gain/clutter adjustments did very little in zero visibility. But, that ECDIS stayed spot on and I had a reference to maintain. For that 20 minutes, it was the best tool in the toolbox.
You are correct. The rules requiring radar to be installed in commercial vessels over a certain size happened during my time at sea and came about after a vessel was lost with all hands on an offshore bank. The vessel could have avoided the tragedy if they had the ability to fix their position with radar in the weather conditions at the time.
The performance standards for marine radars was upgraded after a passenger vessel struck a reef and 51 people lost their lives. The sole 3 cm radar antenna had stopped turning due to the strength of the wind.
It was nothing short of a miracle that the other 700 survived.
It could be, I’m not very familiar with the history of aviation safety.
Another example on the maritime side; back in the day there would be less push-back from industry against the requirement for radar because it can be used to maintain schedule in poor visibility. In the case of something like lifeboats there would be greater push-back as there are no similar gains.
However a well publicized event like the sinking of the Titanic with the loss of people of higher status was sufficient to overcome that reluctance.
Devaney devotes a chapter to this in Tankship Tromedy.
He said everyone expected the owners to kick and scream about the double hull requirements of opa 90 because it would significantly increase new build costs.
But the owners loved it and only asked for one condition: a grandfather clause. The higher construction cost of newbuilds doubled the barrier of entry for anyone looking to start a new tanker company while simultaneously increasing the bluebook value of the grandfathered single hull fleet significantly overnight.
One of the things that struck me with the El Faro BVR transcript was the banter about the anemometer and how getting funding for a replacement was an issue. WTF? You run a ship that size, but you won’t replace a bit of instrumentation that’ll set you back to the tune of a couple minutes’ fuel burn and be installed in an afternoon? Never made sense to me.
Budgets are necessary, but they need to be realistic. They are just arbitrary spending goals
The company needs to spend whatever it takes to maintain the vessel in safe, seaworthy and reliable condition with good up to date gear. If it under budgeted, that just means that it’s time for some new bean counters.
The bean counters aka accountants do not operate in a vacuum. They weigh costs and benefits as directed by the company owners. The owners make sure ships are owned [on paper]in countries which protect them from suits. These companies then insure themselves minimally, just enough to get the next shipment. Mariners are disposable. If you do not believe that ask what happened to the owners of the El Faro. Until greedy bastards go to prison nothing will change. Did they encourage him to avoid the hurricane at all cost? Nope.
We used to joke that if you wanted 12 2B pencils you ordered 24 and had some nameless clerk adjust it. Lists for dry dock are either tagged ship staff or deleted. A request for anemometer to be replaced likely met with a reference to the marine observers manual and a vague mention that it will be considered at the next dry dock.
The list of critical equipment required to be operational in a ship is not very extensive and does not include tank gauging and draft indicators which could be why car carriers keep falling over.
I don’t know much about commercial aircraft but I’m pretty sure that all equipment has to be working before it leaves the ground.
Not all - your company can develop an MEL (Minimum Equipment List). Some things might impose operating restrictions, like one alternator out means day-VFR only. No windshield heat can mean temperature and/or altitude limits and not going near ice.
Air Canada was flying without fuel gauges working, their MEL allowed them to use the totalizer instead. That works as well as the human entering the fuel purchased, order gallons and get liters and you get on the news for gliding in to a landing
I would have sticked the tanks if possible, but I am not 100% sure their airplane had a way to do that.
Two of the most recent major maritime calamities the Wakashio and the Ever Given both involved ships that were Panamanian flagged and had Captains from India.
Perhaps there is a problem with the Panamanian flag and/or the standard of training of Indian seafarers. Some say the Indian education is based on wrote learning, they are encouraged to memorize textbooks but not necessarily understand what they are memorizing.
I’ve seen some people who can almost recite the Colregs backwards but you see them in the ship simulator they do really badly in certain collision avoidance scenarios, the assessment of deck officers should be much more simulator based, to weed out the people who just learn the Colregs by wrote memorization but don’t really understand them.
I know that our nautical school places a great emphasis in students demonstrating practical competency in tasks as well as understanding the theory behind it.
