At some point it comes down to probabilities. With so many flights going on, one in a million incidents become a certainty. For example UA232 [1] suffered failure in all 3 redundant hydraulic systems due to an uncontained engine failure. Any of the 3 systems would have been enough to retain control of the aircraft. Of course this lead to some investigations on why all 3 systems could be impacted at the same time and what can be done to limit failures.

Besides the technical aspects that flight is an impressive example of resilience and skill. Bringing that plane down to the ground in nearly one piece was essentially impossible and a one in a million chance in itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232

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wat10000 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Airlines operate to a much stricter standard than one in a million. If one in a million flights ended in a fatal crash, the US alone would see about 3 airline passenger deaths per day on average. The actual average over the past 10 years is under 0.02 deaths per day.

It's true that you can never get to zero. There's always a chance of some catastrophic failure. The lesson of modern airline safety is that you can get extremely close to zero by carefully analyzing and learning from the failures, which is exactly why these thorough investigations are done. The lesson from UA232 was to make sure one failure can't take out all of the hydraulic systems.

In this specific instance, "the engine fell off and took out another engine, leaving the aircraft with insufficient power to climb" is definitely not in the realm of "probabilities will get you eventually." It's very much in the realm of a mechanical failure that should not happen, combined with a bad design flaw that turns that failure from a mere emergency into pretty much guaranteed death.

Cargo is held to a lower standard than passenger service, but I suspect this will still spell the end of the DC-10 and MD-11, at least in the US. Engines will fail, and for an aircraft of this size, that needs to be survivable in all phases of flight just for the safety of people on the ground.

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chasil 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The lesson of modern airline safety is that you can get extremely close to zero by carefully analyzing and learning from the failures, which is exactly why these thorough investigations are done.

I have heard it said that "every air safety rule is written in blood."

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/02/travel/tokyo-plane-crash-safe...

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SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the engine had just failed, they would very likely have been fine. Experienced crew, would likely have handled it. But the engine came off the wing, and then another engine was damaged. At that point there was no recovery possible.

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16bytes 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Airlines operate to a much stricter standard than one in a million. If one in a million flights ended in a fatal crash, the US alone would see about 3 airline passenger deaths per day on average.

I think you conflated flights (several 10Ks per day) with passengers (several million per day).

One in a million flights is one accident every few decades.

> at least in the US. Engines will fail

As per the report, this appears to be a structural failure, not an engine failure.

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	▲	wat10000 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If randomly distributed, one in a million flights crashing and killing all passengers means that one in a million passengers dies. The US sees about 25,000 airline flights per day, or around 9 million per year. So with one in a million flights crashing, we'd expect roughly 9 crashes per year.