Aviation tragedy: Emergency response personnel work at the site where a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 aircraft crashed at Muan International Airport, southwest of Seoul on Jan 4. The plane was carrying 181 people from Thailand to South Korea. — AFP
IF you yearn for a future where you can travel from place to place in safety and comfort, some of the major transport events of 2024 might feel like a setback. Don’t give up hope.
The crash of Jeju Air Co flight 2216 on Dec 29, killing all but two of the 181 on board, and the death of 38 four days earlier when Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 was apparently being erroneously targeted by Russian anti-aircraft weapons, helped give the year the worst death toll in commercial aviation since 2018.
It was a similar situation on the ground. For a decade, autonomous driving has promised to bring aviation’s normally enviable safety record to the world’s roads.
Last year it seemed to hit a roadblock - or at least halted in front of a harmless plastic bag and caused a traffic jam, as one confused Chinese robotaxi did earlier this year.
Apple Inc in February junked its 10-year, secretive plan to build a self-driving electric car.
In May, Hyundai Motor Co and parts-maker Aptiv Plc halted their multi-billion Motional joint venture.
Last month, General Motors Co pulled the plug on its Cruise self-driving car project, having spent about US$9bil since acquiring the business in 2016.
Elon Musk, to be sure, unveiled a promised Tesla Inc robotaxi – but, given his record, it’s anyone’s guess when, or if, that project will make it to the roads.
The shine is coming off autonomous vehicles in the public mind, too.
These days, they appear less the subject of Jetsons-style futuristic daydreams, and more the subject of mockery and even hate – whether they’re endlessly circling roundabouts, crashing with delivery robots, or being disabled by activists.
Some 672 vehicles operated by Alphabet Inc-owned Waymo vehicles were recalled in May for a software update after one of them hit a wooden pole in Phoenix.
Believe it or not, there’s a lot in common between these sets of incidents in the air and on the ground – and learning the lessons of that can result in outcomes that are positive both for aircraft, and driverless cars, and the passengers who rely on them.
That’s because the long-term trend in aviation safety is still astonishingly good, something that 2024’s freak accidents can’t really change.
When thousands of people die every year in air crashes – the normal course of things until about two decades ago – an accident involving one 180-seat single-aisle jet doesn’t move the needle all that much.
When the number is in the low hundreds or even tens (roughly the situation we’ve been in over the past decade, depending on how you measure it) a one-time event can change perceptions drastically.
There were more air crashes worldwide in 1927 – when Charles Lindbergh made the first non-stop transatlantic flight – than in 2023, when more than 111,400 planes flew between Western Europe and North America during the summer months. The secret of this success is the paranoid safety culture within aviation.
Certifying a new plane can take the best part of a decade. Once flying, it’s monitored obsessively by maintenance engineers, with the smallest defect leading to fleet-wide groundings and checks.
Crashes, when they happen, are pored over for years for clues about what went wrong, and how to avert similar catastrophes in future.
The best players remaining in the robotaxi space seem to have learned that lesson.
By recalling the software on those 672 Waymo vehicles rather than just crossing fingers and hoping for the best, the company was treating its fleet in the same perfectionist way that airlines and aircraft manufacturers treat theirs.
By tying up with Waymo after winding back its Motional venture, Hyundai was learning another lesson from aviation: Safety will advance faster if you can share a vast database of information with potential competitors, rather than treat such data as proprietary and attempt to forge your own path.
Tesla’s tie-up with Baidu Inc in China could follow a similar model, given the Chinese company’s existing Apollo robotaxi business.
There’s no guarantee the industry as a whole will continue to learn that lesson.
In particular, it’s impossible to miss the fact that the most influential person on US robotaxi policy in the next four years may well be Musk, whose insouciant attitude to safety has been under increasing federal scrutiny over the past year.
Still, following aviation’s cautious path is the best hope that autonomous driving can finally become a reality outside of the handful of cities where it’s being trialed.
Silicon Valley likes to move fast and break things — but when the things that could be broken are human bodies, you need to move at a more sedate pace. — Bloomberg
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
