Darryl Campbell
Appearances
Apple News Today
Yes, it’s safe to fly. So why have there been so many crashes?
Even including the recent crashes, your risk of getting in a fatal plane crash is about 0.2 per million flights. So it's pretty small. Put another way, you'd have to fly about twice a day for almost 2,500 years before you get into a fatal plane crash.
Apple News Today
Yes, it’s safe to fly. So why have there been so many crashes?
We're kind of fighting the emotional brain and the rational brain a little bit. But whenever we see one of those big plane crashes on the news, it obviously sticks with us.
Apple News Today
Yes, it’s safe to fly. So why have there been so many crashes?
It takes two years to get a new air traffic controller from initial hiring to qualified enough to start actually working in the tower. It takes about that long for a pilot to get certified. This is just not a switch that you can turn on and off overnight. And I think to have that huge drain of experience and just personnel really put a lot of strain on the aviation system.
Apple News Today
Yes, it’s safe to fly. So why have there been so many crashes?
We know, for example, that almost 90% of the nation's air traffic control facilities are significantly understaffed, that a significant proportion of the control systems, radars, all the tools that air traffic controllers use in their day-to-day are sometimes decades out of date.
Apple News Today
Yes, it’s safe to fly. So why have there been so many crashes?
So they're in bad need of a modernization, and we just haven't really seen Congress come through with any kind of funding to do that.