Fatalities per revenue passenger-mile have decreased by a factor of 15x from 1989 to 2018 (and 54x from 1970 to 2018) [1].
[1] https://theblogbyjavier.com/2019/01/02/aviation-safety-evolu...
Just one of many examples of what can go wrong: overreliance on instruments and information that is lagged vs. reality, around severe conditions, at night. Five souls lost. ATC had repeatedly advised the pilot against his course of action, to no avail.
Not grounding the plane after that, despite the fact that Boeing must have had the knowledge of what have gone on is corporate mass murder for profit.
you take the point of view that nothing is good enough because it could have been better?
Yes, it would definitely had been better if 346 people wouldn't have been killed by a greedy corporate behemoth, which very obviously cares much more about profits than about the people they killed. This point is pretty obvious when you listen to their mealy mouthed pr bullshit.
I trust this answers your question.
Mistakes will be made; automation in the name of safety has killed people and will continue to kill people. But overall automation and resource management in the cockpit have conspired to make aviation incredibly safe compared to the past.
No, it crashed because of a predictable event that a number of engineers had already warned could happen, based on an obvious design flaw that was not fixed.
I attended a presentation by Captain Haynes back in the early 90's. He showed several photos of the DC-10's hydraulic system. In many places the triple-redundant hydraulic lines were parallel and in close proximity to each other, close enough to be taken out by a single piece of shrapnel from an uncontained engine failure.
Financial and economic theory don't recognise ecological inputs including the time and replenishment rates associated with nonrenewable resource formation. (By definition, a "nonrenewable resource" is on whose extraction or extinction rate exceeds that of its formation.) It invokes utterly nonscientific principles such as Hotellings Rule (precisely zero geological references cited) and the Rule of Capture to justify pricing and business behaviours.
Capitalism relies on and exercises externalities of pollution, risk-shifting, and cost-burden shifting to increase firm profits at a cost of larger social burden.
The legal structure of incorporation is literally a risk-externalising engine, recognised by name in some cases ("limited liability corporation"), in which risk-based costs are externalised or stoplossed. This can be useful in cases, but can also be grossly overused.
"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power" is among the shortest sentences in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, a work not given to short sentences. Financial wealth leads to political and market power, including the power to distort markets. Much of Smith's book was a criticism of such practices. That lesson is largely lost by modern boosters of the work, who instead prefer stringing together synthesised passages across hundreds of pages of multiple sections of the book to advance their own, power-centralising ideologies.
Capitalism, finance, and business have a schizoid and faulty relationship with risk. "Cutting corners" is precisely a capitalistic measure, one which arbitrages a potential cost with a present realised savings. The bet is that the potential cost will never be realised. Sometimes that's not the case, but sometimes it is, and the firms which win that bet, based entirely on luck, are rewarded by the market. The market makes no distinction between profit gained by full realisation of probabalistic costs, and profit gained by ignoring those costs, in the individual case.
(In the aggregate profile case, the risks balance out, but specific performance matters and is independent of the profile returns.)
In market returns to various goods and services, pricing behaviours of commodities (undifferentiated bulk goods), services, labour, rents, assets, and highly differentiated specialty goods vary. In particular, the iron law of wages (tending to subsistence, or lower, levels) and the law of rents (capturing all consumer surplus value) mean that over time wealth accrues to rentiers and owners of capital, at a cost of labour.
Addressing these issues would require massive changes to accounting, risk premium, and legal regimes. That same "wealth is power" dynamic means that such reforms are exceedingly unlikely, because those who benefit by false models also benefit by ensuring that those models are protected and preserved.