Yes. It happens. In a recent news clip a pilot was interviewed about the MAX and he raised the risk of bird strike and birthday balloons as something that “happens all the time”.
GP is (quite reasonably) using a deliberately slightly silly example as a rhetorical flourish. I would do the same. Think of it of a stand-in or totem for all of the possibilities (from silly to very real) that leap into horrifying life in an engineer's brain when they learn that a critical system has a single point of failure.
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birthday balloon? In front of a landing plane at 170mph?
In a safety-critical design you have to take in account what will happen if what cannot happen happens.
Yes. It happens. In a recent news clip a pilot was interviewed about the MAX and he raised the risk of bird strike and birthday balloons as something that “happens all the time”.
It actually happens, similarly to bird strikes or collisions with essentially any object that can float or fly into the path of a plane.
https://simpleflying.com/avianca-airbus-a319-balloon-strike/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-09-22-me-41720-...
https://dronedj.com/2021/08/31/update-faa-says-envoy-air-pas...
GP is (quite reasonably) using a deliberately slightly silly example as a rhetorical flourish. I would do the same. Think of it of a stand-in or totem for all of the possibilities (from silly to very real) that leap into horrifying life in an engineer's brain when they learn that a critical system has a single point of failure.