Live data from Hacker News

Pilot of Boeing flight says he lost control after instrument failure

cnn.com

201–210 of 302 posts

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

#201
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally agree, but the truth is that it is hard to say that the public has lost trust in Boeing when more people than ever are in the air. The peanut gallery is on to something, and Boeing is losing orders, but it doesn't seem to be enough to actually change anything.

> it is hard to say that the public has lost trust in Boeing

I've temporarily lost trust in them until they get their shit together. Airplanes are only safe because manufacturing and maintainence has been done diligently over the past couple decades and with sufficient attention to prevention of known hazards. As soon as that diligence disappears, airplanes can become unsafe, very quickly. If an accident could have been prevented by diligence, I lose trust.

I've been flying but avoiding Boeing aircraft in the past few months, until we get to the bottom of this. Many of my friends are doing the same.

I've also had multiple pilots explicitly announce that "this is not a 737 Max" or something to that effect.

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

#202
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is worthy of reporting. 50+ people were injured, one is in severe condition.

Flight control incidents that cause injuries are not hard to find on avherald. I guess I'm not saying it isn't worth reporting. Before the Boeing Narrative set in, these kinds of stories did get reported! But now they're tied into this long-running Boeing arc, and it's frustrating because there isn't enough in the story to know what's really going on.

If you want to be a contrarian after a whistleblower is dead and 50 people were injured, maybe you should have some real data, stats or information instead of just saying "it happens all the time".

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

#203
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is worthy of reporting. 50+ people were injured, one is in severe condition.

Flight control incidents that cause injuries are not hard to find on avherald. I guess I'm not saying it isn't worth reporting. Before the Boeing Narrative set in, these kinds of stories did get reported! But now they're tied into this long-running Boeing arc, and it's frustrating because there isn't enough in the story to know what's really going on.

[flagged]

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

#204
post #76

If you watch The Aviation Herald, this kind of reporting feels a little like trying to write news stories off VAERS data. Crazy shit is happening more or less all the time in planes; the idea isn't that nothing ever goes wrong, but that layered controls prevent injuries or hull losses. It's not that there necessarily isn't a thru-line to these stories. And I read "Flying Blind" like everyone else and share the popula…

74gear[1] on YouTube is a 747 Captain. It's a great aviation channel in general if anyone is interested in that stuff. He had mentioned two things that really illustrated to me your point a while back: A) Stuff breaks on planes. All the time. They are complex machines, but they typically have so many redundancies that unless there is a completely catastrophic failure, they are still perfectly safe to fly. An example:…

>It's a great aviation channel in general if anyone is interested in that stuff.

It's an aviation channel for people who aren't into aviation. Lot's of clickbait + obvious optimization of titles and topics to appeal to the masses. The Mr Beast of pilots.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

74gear[1] on YouTube is a 747 Captain. It's a great aviation channel in general if anyone is interested in that stuff. He had mentioned two things that really illustrated to me your point a while back: A) Stuff breaks on planes. All the time. They are complex machines, but they typically have so many redundancies that unless there is a completely catastrophic failure, they are still perfectly safe to fly. An example:…

> They are complex machines, but they typically have so many redundancies But Boeing reduced redundancies, presumably to cut costs. The 737 MAX planes that crashed only had one AoA sensor. Where else did they cut costs? Where else did they reduce redundancies? The public trust has been lost. Boeing needs to design a new plane from scratch, this time let engineers design the plane without interference from accountants…

This is VERY bad engineering practice, you throw away knowns for unknowns. A blue sky design isn't a fix. Especially if your corporate culture has the wrong leadership. First year engineers take engineering economics for a reason. Money is always an object.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah after the MCAS incident showing a kind of malice and the door blowout showing incompetency, I'm perfectly happy to start treating Boeing as guilty until proven innocent on these incidents. They haven't really been behaving in a way that they're worthy of giving them the benefit of the doubt. Until they start to show that they're changing their behavior (which they clearly didn't do after the MCAS incident) then…

I'm fine if you want to distrust or dislike or sanction Boeing. But that's not a good epistemology; it's not bringing you closer to understanding what's happening. It's also deeply incurious (as a rhetorical strategy, not as a belief system).

I think the people who are plugged into avherald.com and trying to prove how much they know about aviation are in a worse state, because they're missing the fact that through MCAS and the plug blowout that Boeing's culture really can't be trusted right now. You're very concerned about the fact that you've been studying dendrology and correcting people about the species and nature of the trees when the forest is just on fire. And I can connect this back to problems with our entire management class, which you can't reach when you're just looking at the technical details and frequency of aviation accidents. There's a way to be incurious about the overall sociological and political environment by overly focusing on detailed technical knowledge.

And I'm acknowledging that they may be "innocent" in this case (in the sense that these kinds of things are expected across all of commercial aviation). I'm not arguing that I know they're guilty and being completely incurious. But my default hypothesis with Boeing has shifted to guilty until proven innocent, and in the absence of conclusive evidence to assume guilt. That isn't actually incurious, since I'm willing to listen to evidence. But the argument that "things like this happen all the time" isn't actually evidence, that's just a rationalization.

And it is okay to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt when they've proved in the past that they don't deserve it. That's just healthy psychological defenses. You move them from the box where they get the benefit of the doubt, over to the box where they don't. To argue nobody should ever do that is to argue that everyone should constantly get manipulated and taken advantage of because this time Lucy isn't going to pull the ball away from Charlie Brown.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All development was offshored to a lowest bidder. Thanks to this, all our critical flight control software is now developed by a single intern aided by Copilot (sic!) We are now looking for a way to optimize the intern away.

Yea I laugh at everyone try to shove AI into hardware and software design of physical products as if there's a market of engineers out there and not just hobbyists keeping things alive in the states. We've long since offshored the development of any physical products that isn't considered ITAR/defense world.

That would imply that my entire career didn't exist!

Hmmm, wonder what I've been hallucinating about for the last 30 years.

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

#208
On Dec 2nd 2016 the FAA had issued their airworthiness directive AD 2016–24–09 summarizing: "We are adopting a new airworthiness directive (AD) for all The Boeing Company Model 787–8 and 787–9 airplanes. This AD requires repetitive cycling of either the airplane electrical power or the power to the three flight control modules (FCMs). This AD was prompted by a report indicating that all three FCMs might simultaneously reset if continuously powered on for 22 days. We are issuing this AD to address the unsafe condition on these products."

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

#209
post #137

The Boeing story is starting to sound a bit like the crime-in-cities story. We always can find some examples somewhere due to sheer volume of Boeing planes and people in cities. However, both are very safe. We have a social problem of embracing speculation, misinformation and disinformation and movements that are little more than angry mobs, and of treating with contempt an adherence to facts and rationality. With ev…

Not really. No airplane was ever grounded by the FAA since the 1970s, when they grounded the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. Since the merger, the FAA has grounded both of Boeing's new planes (The 787 Dreamliner and the 737 Max). Boeing's safety record is objectively declining. They are shipping out airplanes with safety issues that are being found "in production". This is why their planes are being grounded (something that…

The fact is that very people have been killed by Boeing planes, and you won't be killed in one either.

The FAA's job is to prevent that - to stop it before it happens. I don't at all object to them grounding planes.

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

#210
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t wait until they replace pilots with remote workers in a low cost of living area.

90% of what a pilot does is sit there, so you can just have one pilot per ten planes, and have them remotely connect to the one that needs attention!

It’s one of those situations where the latency, packet loss and jitter really does kill you!
Post reply on HN