The Lessons of the Seattle Plane Crash

["DAVID FARBER" <dfarber () me com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Lessons of the Seattle Plane Crash
> Date: August 14, 2018 at 10:47:52 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Lessons of the Seattle Plane Crash
> It’s not possible to eliminate all risks from modern life—but airlines and regulators work hard to reduce them after 
> each new incident, anyway.
> By James Fallows
> Aug 12 2018
> <https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2018/08/the-lessons-of-the-seattle-plane-crash/567359/>
>
> Modern life is full of potentially terrifying “What if?” possibilities. What if a pharmacist decided to substitute 
> morphine pills or strychnine for the next prescription you pick up? What if a school-bus driver decided to swing the 
> wheel, and plow a full load of children head-on into incoming traffic, or off an overpass?
>
> What if a FedEx or UPS courier decided to deliver a box full of explosives, or anthrax spores, to an office building, 
> rather than business supplies? What if a disturbed student, teacher, or parent walked into a public school and opened 
> fire on everyone in sight?
>
> The last possibility is a reminder that there are risks some societies will define as acceptable. All the rest 
> illustrate the reality that our lives hang by threads that someone else could decide to cut. The ability to inflict 
> harm, whether intentionally or accidentally, rises more or less in pace with the technological complexity and 
> interdependence of modern life.
>
> Every modern city dweller depends for daily well-being and even survival on systems that make up the hard and soft 
> infrastructure of society: water, power, sanitation, public health, and on down the list of services no one notices 
> until something goes wrong. Most are run by people we don’t know, whose competence and good intentions we have no 
> choice but to take for granted. As for people determined to do harm—the pharmacist who wants to poison customers, the 
> bus driver intent on suicide—the only absolute protection would be surveillance and regimentation on a draconian 
> scale. (Want to avoid the risk that any bus driver, ever, could do something rash? Send them all through full FBI 
> criminal-background checks, plus psychological testing, and then staff every bus with both a driver and a co-driver, 
> each to keep an eye on the other. Any school system could do this. None that I’m aware of does, since it would price 
> bus service out of the realm of practicality.)
>
> Thus sane approaches to security have been careful to set the goal of reducing risks, rather than eliminating them. 
> The first is possible, and it naturally leads to discussions of cost, practicality, and the trade-offs between 
> security and liberty. The second is in most cases impossible, and it naturally invites “security theater”-style 
> posturing in fending off threats, and “How could this have happened???” overreaction when something inevitably goes 
> wrong. (For more of The Atlantic’s case against security theater, especially involving the early years of the TSA, 
> see pieces by Jeffrey Goldberg here, here, and here, and by me here and here. )
>
> So we come to the bizarre, frightening, and tragic episode on Friday night in Seattle, in which a ground-staff 
> baggage employee of a regional airline got into an empty twin-engine turboprop, started it up and took off without 
> permission, flew dramatic aerobatic maneuvers over Puget Sound, and then crashed on an island off Tacoma, killing 
> himself in an apparent suicide.
>
> Bizarre, frightening, and tragic this certainly was. But was it a sign of an alarming failure in security practices, 
> as some press accounts immediately asserted? (For instance, from the United Kingdom’s The Telegraph, soon after the 
> event: “It has raised fundamental questions about airline security at America’s major airports after the mechanic was 
> able to board the plane, taxi onto the runway and take off without being stopped. Aviation experts questioned what 
> the authorities would have been able to do if the pilot was determined to fly the plane into a city rather than do 
> loop-the-loops.”)
>
> Maybe this will be the appropriate response when more facts are known. For the moment, as is usually the case with 
> aviation disasters, many of the most important questions about what happened are impossible to answer right away. 
> Here are some of the aviation details, known and still puzzling, and then my hypothesis as to how this could have 
> happened. (I trained for and got my instrument rating at Boeing Field in Seattle in 1999, and flew frequently in 
> Seattle airspace when I lived there in 1999 and 2000.)
>
> [snip]
>
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