UPDATES: Are The Wheels Coming Off?

Another day, another aviation near-miss, involving a Boeing aircraft, no less.

Another day, another aviation near-miss, involving a Boeing aircraft, no less.

The account from The New York Times:

A Boeing 757 plane operated by Delta Air Lines lost a nose wheel as it prepared to take off from Atlanta’s main airport on Saturday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. It was the latest troubling episode involving one of the manufacturer’s aircraft.

Delta Air Lines Flight 982 was preparing to take off from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for a trip to Bogotá, Colombia, at about 11:15 a.m. Saturday when a “nose wheel came off and rolled down the hill,” the agency said in a preliminary report.

More than 170 passengers who were aboard had to deplane, but no one was hurt, the report said.

Once more, thank goodness there were no injuries or loss of life. At the same time, the thought creeps into mind: how many bullets can you dodge?

Boeing, especially, has been dodging quite a few bullets over the past few years:

It’s been a turbulent period for Boeing, which has been fraught in recent years with safety concerns after deadly catastrophes. The manufacturer faces renewed scrutiny after a door plug blew off a new Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 plane at 16,000 feet on Jan. 5 just after it took off from the Portland International Airport in Oregon.

Here’s the audio of the most recent incident if you want to listen:

https://twitter.com/gregg_re/status/1749835450804576370

The most unsettling aspect of the incident is that the aircrew of Delta Flight 982 didn’t realize what had happened when it happened. An observant pilot in another aircraft noticed the wheel had come off and called it in just seconds before Flight 982 was about to straighten up onto the runway for take-off. Had the plane started rolling at full power, control could’ve been lost, leading to a catastrophic incident without it even taking flight.

Close calls happen, more often than you think. But goodness, some are just too close for comfort.

That said, close calls are definitely part of the game and their prevalence needs to be taken into account when assessing whether or not the aviation industry is on glide-slope for disaster. There are many such channels, but if you check out VASAviation on YouTube as an example, you’ll see just how frequently these near-misses occur. Some of the incidents, at least at a glance, seem quite serious, yet these flights all seem to manage to avoid disaster. Once upon a time, within living memory, some of these incidents would’ve inevitably resulted in loss of life or aircraft. You have to wonder if maybe these incidents are part-and-parcel in aviation and the fact that they don’t end so tragically is a testament to the competency of our pilots, not the lack thereof. Flying is naturally dangerous, after all, and what you want are people who can adapt and overcome when emergencies do occur.

Still, this latest incident tells me the next aviation disaster (which I hope never occurs) will be the result of manufacturing flaws that go unaddressed or a failure in maintenance, not incompetent piloting or air traffic control. Maybe we’re not at the point where all commercial air traffic needs to be grounded until they figure out what the hell is going on, but maybe an industry-wide reinforcement on the importance of quality control and attention to detail is necessary. How to do that, I’m not sure.

What I’m sure of is that any more of these incidents will shake the confidence of not only passengers, but maybe even of those who operate and maintain these machines. That’s a scary place to be.

Because I Got High

Reader and frequent commenter “Reckoning” shared an interesting theory on what may be behind the seeming lack of attention to detail contributing to some of these near-misses:

This is speculative, but perhaps these absurd lapses of concentration and safety breaches have something to do with rampant pot use.

When I got a factory summer job in the 1990s, I had to pee in a cup. Mandatory drug testing has been a feature of a lot of blue collar workplaces and litigation.

I suspect that a lot of workplaces have had to quietly abandon or loosen drug restrictions. And even if the person isn’t presently using, they may have blasted their brains long enough to cause permanent damage to their concentration and attention span.

I don’t know about this one. I’ve worked many blue-collar jobs in my life; they’ve always been strict about drug use. Employers will tolerate lots of things (up to a point, of course), but the one thing that always seemed to get employees canned was testing positive for drugs or alcohol while on the job. I don’t know what it’s like in Canada, where Reckoning hails, but in the United States, not only is there no excuse for an employee to have illicit substances or intoxicants in their system, there’s no excuse for employers to keep someone like that on the payroll. The liability is massive.

That said, like Reckoning said, you can only get in trouble if you get caught. I’ve known lots of guys who live on the edge, risking jobs by smoking marijuana or even doing harder drugs. I can’t speak from experience (I’ve never taken drugs), but we all know that drug use can result in long-term adverse cognitive impairment. This is one of those “straw breaks the camel’s back” sorts of things; smoking dope once may not cause you to crash the baggage cart, but repeated usage might cause you to show up to work not on your A-game on a consistent enough basis.

It’s no different from alcohol. You may be neither intoxicated nor have any alcohol in your system on the job. However, if you drink regularly enough, you’ll be showing up to work hungover just as often. All those hangovers can contribute to fatigue that leads to less-than-optimal performance on the job.

Then again, drug and alcohol use on the job was more rampant back in the old days, which is a big reason why it’s taken so seriously nowadays, so I don’t know if that’s what’s causing these incidents to occur. Still interesting to consider.

The Futility Of Spending & Saving

Reckoning also had this to say about home ownership and managing your finances:

Regarding home ownership, with the benefit of hindsight you can always second guess your decision. My wife and I are happy with our home that felt crazy expensive at the time, but in retrospect we should have dug a little deeper and bought a better house in a better location. We didn’t realize how cost prohibitive it is to move later on in terms of taxes, real estate commissions and moving costs. So you are more locked in than you realize into your first house.

We had to spend around $100k in the first 5 years on modest repairs and renovations (new roof and eaves, new furnace and AC, washer dryer, stove, repainting, replacing the basement carpet, etc). Basically things only last 15-20 years. Homes are also a ton more work than apartment living.

So home ownership is a painful experience in many ways, although I found it really nice to have a beautiful backyard during Covid.

The home really is an investment. The sell price of a home is just the starting point. Sometimes, the fact a home is affordable just means there’s going to be more more spent on getting it up to a livable state. I don’t want to say it amounts to a raw deal, but it can certainly feel that way.

Whereas if you rent an apartment, your only obligations are to pay rent on time and keep it clean. Otherwise, you just live there. Granted, you’re ultimately living on someone else’s property, you depend on them to correct any problems that may arise, and renting property doesn’t create capital. Everything in life comes with trade-offs. But just remember - this is how most people throughout history have lived.

Mass property ownership really is a historical aberration, a specifically American one. We bristle at the saying you will own nothing and be happy, but the truth is, that was very much the case for most people. I’m not saying it’s a good thing - it’s a terrible thing - but property is ultimately limited and controlled by the more powerful factions in society. This is especially true when it comes to capital and capital-generating assets. History a tale of people trying to control access to these things.

None of us should want to live in a society where access to capital and property is out of reach. We’re not supposed to be peasants living in the Middle Ages, no matter what the Joe Biden class thinks. However, we need to understand, even if things work out for the best, mass property-ownership is going to be less of a thing going forward. We may need to get more used to being lifetime renters. It’s disheartening - after all, property ownership is the surest way any of us will access capital - but historically, it’s just not the norm. I think it’s more important to focus our efforts on making sure the state doesn’t take more of our property away from us than to aspire to something which, due to circumstances beyond our control, will become less attainable.

Reckoning with some financial perspective:

I think that the impact of saving tiny amounts of money on mini-luxuries is overstated. If you save the cost of one coffee each working day, you’ll save a few hundred a year. Who cares.

It’s the big decisions that have a massive financial impact: how much to spend on rent, whether to buy a car, cost of vacations. cost of education, what job to get... best to spend more time on the big decisions rather than agonizing over small expenses.

People also underestimate the cost of the single lifestyle if you are dating and want to keep up appearances. Living poor is great if you don’t want a relationship with the opposite sex.

So I wouldn’t feel guilty over spending some money on yourself today, as opposed to saving for a tomorrow that may never come.

My argument in favor of strict frugality is simply that one cannot complain about money that isn’t there if that money is being spent on things that aren’t necessary for survival. A few hundred can easily go towards medical bills and some costs simply don’t contribute to long-term well-being. I say this as someone who thinks we should all be willing to spend some money on ourselves; otherwise, we’ll go crazy. At the same time, there’s a way to “live a little” without spending money unnecessarily. For example, smoking might make you feel good, but not only does it burn a hole in your pocket, it’s bad for your health, too.

Frugality is about ensuring money is available to get you through each day, not necessarily about saving for a tomorrow that may never come. Money will need to be spent daily; few of us go through life without spending a single dollar each day. I always ask everyone to remember the time you ended up in a situation where you needed something as simple as a screwdriver and it wasn’t on hand; money is the same thing. Life’s necessities always take precedence over life’s luxuries; frugality is simply a way of prioritizing.

That said, Reckoning does have a point - there’s a difference between ensuring money is available when needed versus expecting those few hundred a year to amount to capital. It won’t. I could cut my daily expenses to bare-bones levels and it’s not going to make the likelihood of home ownership any higher. In that sense, managing large expenses is more important than managing the little ones. There is a point of diminishing returns even when it comes to saving money. Nickel-and-dime yourself enough and you’ll find no reason to spend money, ever. The important thing is to spend money on things that are worthwhile and won’t put you in debt. Those working-day coffees aren’t going to do that, but a nice car will and so will buying a dog or going on vacation to Europe.

When you get right down to it, managing money is among the hardest things any of us will ever do. The fact so many of us are in debt isn’t just a matter of the cost of living being high, high as it might be. It also shows that humans aren’t all good at managing resources.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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