>it's often directly related to human error or a severe defect brought about by a decision to cut costs
I wonder if companies do cost-benefit analysis on those kinds of situation. "We saved X amount of £ on cutting costs. Outages as a result of cost cutting Y amount of £". You would think that at least stock holders would insist.
In a past life I was an IT consultant and good organizations do ask this question. Sometimes you have to ask the question like that to get business leaders (or board members) to pay attention to that "new IT spending".
I never said the contrary. But a tons of these systems are old, and people knowing how they work are long gone.
Plus doing a proper post mortem and understanding how it works woudl take a lot of time and money. Things they most of the time to not have budget for.
A while ago (when I was in aerospace) there was one senior people who gave us the price of insurance per head.
Given that we're talking about 1M€ per head and that a plane can easily have 200 people. I have a hard time finding a situation where I can expect a Return On Investment by doing things poorly and cheaply. We're talking many millions of payout.
(And yet, I'd love to have such a situation, it's always good to attract the attention of attendees at conference or student classrooms).
Then later I realized that I've made a mistake in my calculation... I'm only accounting for A SINGLE plane failing and killing everyone. In the real world, a bad component would be shipped to a whole batch of planes and they'd fall randomly like flies.
That batch-effect drastically increases the cost of failure. So... I really don't see ANY place where there is a ROI on people dying.
BAZINGA!!! I'm from Europe and people are expensive there. The trick is to manufacture things for the 3rd world market where people get peanuts when they die (sometimes even nothing) :D
But then again... we're back to square one, how could I build parts AND guarantee that they're only shipped to planes in low-cost locations? At that point, it's probably closer to a plane-by-plane targeted sabotage rather than a scheme of doing minimum-shit-to-close-sales. And when doing plane-by-plane there is no economy of scale :(
... Anyway!
Just wanted to say that any analysis would clearly reveal that THE PLANE IS CHEAPER WHEN IT FLIES!!! (and your life is truly expensive) so you're fine. You can keep on using airplanes ;)
Also, people at work do have a conscience.
Once in a while they may forget about the importance of what they do, luckily there is a plane crash happening every few months to remind them that there are lifes at stake, for real (in case it was ever forgotten).
I wonder if companies do cost-benefit analysis on those kinds of situation. "We saved X amount of £ on cutting costs. Outages as a result of cost cutting Y amount of £". You would think that at least stock holders would insist.