Originally Posted by
franklin_m
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.
If we got rid of automobiles we could eliminate all problems associated with them such as drunk driving and hit and run incidents, But to get rid autos would be unreasonable and create
far more problems than it would solve. The same is true for anything be it model aviation or otherwise no matter how many restrictions you may come up with there will still be risks.
There has to be balance between what is reasonable and what will enhance safety and more restrictions, and there will always be disagreements on what should be done but in
general if rules from a common sense point of view are too unreasonable they will largely be ignored and sometimes have a opposite effect than intended.