Live data from Hacker News

Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

cnn.com

61–70 of 302 posts

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable." Maybe, but also the alternative is that pilots may be pressued not to report these things due to career or crony capitalist concerns like pressure from their employer or are told this crash is 'normal'. Airlines and Boeing are not "nice guys" and are historically toxic and vindictive companies against the working class. So that leaves us whistleblowers of lower prof…

[flagged]

Of the three, Manning and Winner, have been convicted (or pleaded) in a court of law, been sentenced to confinement, and served the time.

As far as I am concerned, those two have paid in full what they owe our society. Leave them be.

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#62

They're down ~27% YTD. Something tells me that there's going to be a "come to Jesus" meeting soon in the C-suite's future that results in the deployment of a golden parachute.

Can only hope to unfortunately find myself with one such meeting scheduled on my calendar!

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#63
post #47
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet competition can and does better, much better re safety currently. Any issue of Airbus would get at least same press coverage, in US even more since media are usually not impartial. Are we already into some boeing whitewashing cycle too?

A lot of safety related improvements(at least in the US) are also due to the FAA and generally the open process of anonymously reporting issues on flights. Each crash has also been meticulously investigated and vast improvements were put in place. The reality is that the most dangerous times on a flight are take off and landing, which is also where human judgement and process plays a large part. As far as breaking ou…

> As far as breaking out of a duopoly, I don't know the path for that

I'm sure China does. Right now they're the only bloc of sufficient size, economy, and most importantly motivation, to pull it off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comac_C919

Do note that some systems in that aircraft are still manufactured by European and American companies or are jointly made.

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#64
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would lean towards an anti-Boeing hype cycle with some confluence of a series of unfortunate events. This is not to say that the QA issues aren't leading to something catastrophic, but on the whole I don't think people quite comprehend the number of flights that take off and land in a day, and how few fatalities and injuries result as of these trips relative to the passenger load.

The problem isn't that "accidents happen", the problem is that airplane safety culture isn't meeting people's expectations anymore. Two planes crashing for the exact same preventable reason mere months apart just does not compute. A single crash would've been quickly forgotten. But two crashes and a long chain of incidents all while the planes were allowed to stay in the air is going to change people's perceptions. T…

> inept leadership

Their leadership are worse than "inept" or "incompetent". Actively evil psychopaths running the show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downfall:_The_Case_Against_Boe...

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#65

A blip of zero controls - not ideal! Although hearsay from a passenger hardly sounds reliable. The thing I'm wondering is: are quality issues happening elsewhere? Or are we caught in an anti-Boeing hype cycle? I'm skeptical whenever the media really grabs hold of a narrative that's so one-sided.

You can test this, to some degree, by using custom date ranges on most of any search engine. Just exclude from the past several days and search for whatever. So for instance, I assume most people know that amongst numerous other issues, a Boeing also had a wheel fall off and cause damage to vehicles and what no on the ground below. So I searched for 'wheel falls off airplane' [1] while excluding the past few months.…

But for the planes that are in-service, any extra scrutiny in the wake of an incident would mostly fall on the airlines, not on Boeing.

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#67

Reminds me of the time my brand new F-250 "crashed" and rebooted. Lost all functionality for almost a minute, completely dropped dead on the road. It rebooted and continued on. Happened one time in five years and ~50k miles.

Teslas were known for doing the same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWWRx6ZuV80

This gives a whole new meaning to the sentence "My car crashed"

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't this this allegedly happened. What authorities are saying Boeing killed a whistleblower?

The whistleblower was found dead in their car of an 'apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound'. Seems extremely unlikely that they would decide to kill themselves after 32 years at Boeing and deciding to blow the whistle. "Barnett, who spent decades working for Boeing at its plants in Everett, Wash., and North Charleston, S.C., had repeatedly alleged that Boeing's manufacturing practices had declined — and that rather…

I can see someone whistle-blowing in good faith, realizing they made a mistake and called out the company for something that it wasn't doing or something that wasn't actually a problem, and killing themselves.

I can also see someone whistle-blowing in good faith, getting harassed by ex-coworkers/managers or the court of public opinion, and just getting overwhelmed by the negative attention and feeling bad for the betrayal and killing themselves.

I can't really see a company faking the suicide of someone that already whistleblew and got national attention. That seems like a great way to exacerbate a problem that, if you leave it alone, probably won't be made worse by your leaving it alone. Like, what, a Boeing executive hired an assassin off the dark web with the click of a button to kill someone that already did the thing he was going to do? Executives can make some pretty poor decisions, so I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it would be a pretty wild mistake to make.

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#69
post #59
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> using parts from scrap bins This is a good micro-example. Scrap bins! Sounds horrible! But is it? Do you know? Or is it just common practice? Is it called a scrap bin in the media to drive a narrative, when really it's just a parts bin like any other? We don't know.

Scrap bin would allude to using parts that are out of tolerance, time expired, or single use ie regardless of cycles or time on wing, the part is required to be replaced every disassembly.

This can include parts that have been assembled only to be disassembled because an issue was found before it left the shop.

Re: Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

#70
post #59
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> using parts from scrap bins This is a good micro-example. Scrap bins! Sounds horrible! But is it? Do you know? Or is it just common practice? Is it called a scrap bin in the media to drive a narrative, when really it's just a parts bin like any other? We don't know.

… I don’t know how to respond to this. This is basically epistemic relativism. Yes, we know that scrap bins are for scrap. I am 100% sure that there is never any reason to be pulling stuff from scrap bins ad-hoc in order to avoid having to reorder parts.

As far as your point is “the whistleblowers could be lying, the video investigations could be staged/one-offs, and the ongoing massive increase in safety incidents could be unrelated to the publicly-bragged-about intentionally-done corner cutting”, that’s fair, the jury is still out. Figuratively, ofc, because they aren’t yet facing any real weighty investigations AFAIK, only small ones.

But “maybe the you’re supposed to use parts from scrap bins”? No. Not for fucking airplanes

EDIT: an analogy; is it ever okay to store passwords in plain text? Maybe, if by “plain text” you mean the text that’s encrypted by a normal auth system. But that’s just not how that word is used, and is giving an absurd benefit of the doubt to people who do not deserve it

Post reply on HN