RCU Forums - View Single Post - Another Drone Pilot does it Again
View Single Post
Old 05-30-2015 | 05:12 AM
  #1512  
franklin_m's Avatar
franklin_m
 
Joined: Nov 2005
Posts: 4,608
Likes: 0
Received 1 Like on 1 Post
From: State College, PA
Default

Originally Posted by porcia83
Risk cannot be totally eliminated, ever. No amount of rules or regulations or planning can stop things from going wrong. Commercial aviation, nuclear power, and virtually ever other industry out there has issues. Wonder if the folks at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima thought risk was eliminated. How many scale aircraft crash a year? Think anyone goes to a MLB game expecting to get clocked in the head by a foul? No.
I guess it's a good thing that the designers of seat belts, airbags, TCAS, backup warning sensors, blind spot monitors, and a host of other technologies didn't hold the attitude that "risk cannot be totally eliminated." Just because events happen doesn't mean we can't take a hard look a the sequence of events, decision making, design, construction, maintenance or other issues to try and prevent the event from happening again.

I don't wish for anything bad to happen. But as a graduate of military aviation safety school and someone who's spent a career managing risk in both aviation and heavy industry, giving up on the idea that risk can be eliminated is an anathema to me and pretty much the entire safety professional community. I see increasing risk to the public as a result of the growing number of large and fast aircraft. I have been trained to not wait until something happens to address an issue, but to try and prevent it. What I'm trying to do with these examples / discussions is to raise awareness that it is possible. But that's the opinion of a safety professional - an aviation safety trained professional at that - so you'll have to decide how much that matters.