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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6479 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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"GetThereItis" is a pretty big driver of incidents across the board:

  • Commercial aviation can end up with five-, six-, or even seven-figure costs because a pilot landed at an alternate airport or delayed a flight too long, infamously part of the cause in Air Ontario 1363, between compensation, hotel rooms, taxis, so on.
  • Charter flights have the time pressure more directly, because there's really no separation from pilot to customer. In theory, any charter operation worth its salt will have explicit 'best-effort' terms, but in practice customer patience varies heavily depending on their own schedule, the cause of the outage, the distance of the flight, and availability of alternatives.
  • Private aviation you can end up in a random 'airport' that's basically a shack (if you're lucky, a shack with a toilet) and a single strip runway, and your best alternative as a rental car shop that won't open again until Monday.

Most of the fatalities tend to be in private aviation, but the pressures are probably higher for charter. I'd assume it's especially hard if you're a sports fan having to tell Kobe Bryant that visibility is shit today, but even without that, it's the sort of business where reputation for reliability is a major driver in future customers. You can afford to have a plane sit out a single flight or a single day for safety sake pretty easily, since fuel and per-hour maintenance is so much of your running costs. But you can't afford to be the guy who cancels at the last minute, because then you end up with planes that sit for weeks on end.

The other big issue is that smaller charter operations can run with much less experienced pilots in one or both seats. I don't buy the full Colgan Air philosophy, but there definitely have been incidents where a pilot whose background overwhelmingly favored fair-weather flights got thrust into environments where they couldn't make that rule apply, and had no ability to judge bad weather conditions from unsafe ones. And while bigger charter operations will push pilots toward education, smaller ones tend to have hobbyist or semi-pro pilots that don't keep up on it.

I'd be willing to buy that similar decision making dooms people in auto accidents too. "Oh, it's just a couple more hours to our destination" has killed more than a few drivers, be they sleepy or on icy or dangerous roads.

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