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Originally Posted by mrthumbs
Thats what everybody says..my post was not about my fear of flying more about the reason why airtraffic is so safe against all the odds so it seems.
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In two words....back-up systems (is that 3 words?)
For everything that happens on a plane there are 3-5 backup systems.
Let me give you an EXTREME example to help make it easy to understand.....Lets say that one fine August day a pilot in a 737 is flying along when suddenly he loses all power to the cockpit. No instrumens, No Controls, No Nothing. What now? First, the plane's onboard computer would sense the outage and would immediately go to auto-pilot to avoid any collision or any sudden change in altitude or direction. Then, the quick thinking pilot would simply flip the switch to the auxilary power generator and things would resume normally. BUT...let's just make it extra scary and pretend that the auxilary power generator did not come on at all and he still had no power to the cockpit. Well, he would simply begin to fly the plane using his own sight (VFR: Visual Flight Rules) and manual controls (manual controls need no power to work...kind of like driving a car before there was power steering). Great...all better, right? Now, just to make you feel even SAFER....lets just throw another kink the wheel....what if it was the dead of night and the pilot could not see three feet in front of the airplane and he needed to fly using his instruments (IFR: Instrument Flight Rules)? Yes, Virginia, there is an answer for that too......the pilot would simply reach to his right hip and yank on a handle that is connected to a cable that is connected to a tiny door on the bottom of the wing. When that door flips open guess what pops out? A fan. Yes, a fan....but not an ordinary fan....a fan connected to a small generator that produces power when the fan turns like a windmill. This fan generates enough power to power the cockpit even in the worst of conditions.
Now....name any car on the road, any boat in the sea or any other mode of transportation that has that many backups to a simple power failure.
Does that answer your question?
BTW...I am not a pilot, but I average a couple of hundred thousand miles a year on Delta and have a ton of friends and neighbors that are Captains and Pilots.
--T