Live data from Hacker News

Preliminary report into Air India crash released

bbc.co.uk

411–420 of 924 posts

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#411
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airlines are decades behind on tech. You can get satellite internet almost anywhere on the planet and GPS can give you ten-foot accurate positioning, but we've still _lost_ planes because we haven't mandated a system that sends the realtime position of the plane over the satellite internet. The days of limited storage are still going strong in the industry.

There are reasons they don’t. This is a deceptively difficult problem Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations) And by stations, I mean aircraft. There are a TON. Current constellations probably wouldn’t even be able to handle half the current aircraft transmitting all at once. Bandwidth, in the physical sense, becomes a limiting factor Covera…

There's somewhere around 15 thousand relevant planes in the air at any time.

If you sent two updates a minute over Iridium, using their 25 byte message plan, you'd be looking at a megabyte per minute for the entire planet. That's such a tiny fraction of what that single constellation can do.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And both pilots deny doing it. > It's difficult to conclude anything other than murder-suicide. You’re trying to prove a negative here. I am not familiar with the 787 operations, but there are a few issues that need to be sorted out first: - altitude when pilots start the after takeoff checklist - if there are any other switches that are operated in tandem in the general vicinity of where the engine cutoff switches…

The switches have lockout mechanisms that prevent accidental triggering. I'm not a pilot, but these guys are, and they find it exceedingly unlikely that anyone would switch both off by accident: https://www.youtube.com/live/SE0BetkXsLg?feature=shared

You have to time it spy movie right to ensure dying.

This is what I am debating.

There are too many variables you need to account for.

For example, I want an expert opinion about the tone in the cockpit when the other pilot said “No, I did not touch it” or what was said. Is it calm? Surprised? Cold?

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentour Pilot is a fantastic channel.

Eh. His older videos are indeed phenomenal, but newer ones are "you won't believe what happened, right after this sponsor break"

FUD. His videos are just as consistently good as they always have been. The sponsor sections can be easily skipped (hint: SponsorBlock).

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#414
Video would definitively show whether either pilot moved these switches or if some other mechanism caused the movement. The aviation industry has consistently resisted cockpit video recording despite decades of available technology. The pilot unions argue privacy concerns, but cases like this demonstrate the value it would have. Current audio captured the pilots' denials, but without visual confirmation we may never be able to definitively determine who turned the engines off.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#416

> The aircraft achieved the maximum recorded airspeed of 180 Knots IAS at about 08:08:42 UTC and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec. The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cut off. So the fuel supply was cut off intentionally. The swi…

It's interesting to see how people manage incomplete information.

You could have made the same assumptions after the first MCAS crash, much like boeing assumed pilot error. It's easy, comforting and sometimes kills people because it makes you stop looking.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#418
post #346

I just want to call out that, whatever the facts of this case, pilot heroism is way more common than pilot murder. This is off the top of my head, so don't quote me on the precise details, I'm probably misremembering some things. But a few of my favorite examples: - British Airways 5390: An incorrect repair causes the windshield of a plane to be blown out mid flight. A pilot is nearly sucked out. The head flight atte…

> British Airways 5390: An incorrect repair causes the windshield of a plane to be blown out mid flight. A pilot is nearly sucked out. This one is a good illustration of how better design can help prevent accidents or make them less severe. The error the maintenance people made was that when they replaced the window and the 90 screws that hold it on 84 of the screws they used were were 0.66 mm smaller in diameter tha…

> plug windows

Surprisingly hard to search for this phrase

This article covers the topic though:

https://www.witpress.com/elibrary/wit-transactions-on-the-bu...

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#419

I just want to call out that, whatever the facts of this case, pilot heroism is way more common than pilot murder. This is off the top of my head, so don't quote me on the precise details, I'm probably misremembering some things. But a few of my favorite examples: - British Airways 5390: An incorrect repair causes the windshield of a plane to be blown out mid flight. A pilot is nearly sucked out. The head flight atte…

If you're focused on whether or not the pilot cares (or is even alive), you've lost the plot. The point is to keep passengers alive regardless of the pilot.

There's no real point to considering what happens if the pilot wants to murder people on board. Of course they will succeed....

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#420
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cost is a big one (satellite data is still quite a bit more expensive than you think, especially with many stations) You get free Starlink on several airlines now, so won't that be a solved problem soon?

Free to passengers doesn’t mean free to the airline, and Starlink in commercial airliners is very new.

sure but if the airline already pays for the service for passengers surely it can be used for the planes as well
Post reply on HN