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Comment by DiggyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

> That a ship with so much more destructive potential is allowed to operate without the same level of redundancy as a $90k Audi, is unconscionable.

Would you still believe this if it was demonstrated that the system lacking redundancy was - due to factors beyond the scope of this conversation - more safe by an order of magnitude than the steering system that includes redundancy but in a different medium?

Put differently: do you think the Space Shuttle should have had ejection seats? If yes, what about an Airbus A320 flying a normal commercial route?

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Ejection seats are a use case noche unique to military flying where the pilot is A) the most irreplaceable piece in terms of warfighting, and B) injury of the pilot in the escape attempt is considered an acceptable tradeoff.

If you really want chills, think about this: a conscious decision was made with covil aviation that it was more economically feasible to sacrifice the human lives on board, and resolve the rest through lawsuits.

In short: if you know/are critical to the process of murdering extra-natiomals, you warrant a life saving device.

If you're a civillian, you're a line item in a potential series legal judgements.

That's wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to start. Where in a commercial airliner do you want to keep several hundred explosive devices that would violently launch a passenger out onto an open air, through a hole punctured through a pressurized fuselage at the perfect moment, when the plane could be either at a cruising altitude, over an ocean, or speeding down a runway?

> In short: if you know/are critical to the process of murdering extra-natiomals, you warrant a life saving device.

Do you think it's even feasible to install ejector seats for 10-30 passengers? What do you think will happen if they all fire at once?

Hell no. I'm just pointing out to the other poster that in addition to the fact that military warfighters have a different social calculus in play.

What I'm decrying, however, is our practice of letting actuaries and lawyers be the final arbiters of what is desirable to engineer.

In addition to the other comments:

Military aircraft are subject to failure from being shot at. Aircraft in combat will fail much, much more often than properly maintained civilian aircraft.

Civilian aircraft don't have election seats because situations where they would be useful are exceedingly rare.

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