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American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

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Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#41

Post by netdevphoenix »

realo wrote: post #39
rhplus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a 777 doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated a…

Well ... It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London: https://thetaxi.academy/ It takes also many years of study before they will let you touch any living person with your scalpel, and then many years of apprenticeship with actual surgeons when you do touch people with your tools. I can imagine maintaining a big jumbo jet also requires some specialized practical knowledge you cannot acqui…

> It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London

That doesn't apply to private hire vehicle drivers afaik.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#42

Post by embedding-shape »

bityard wrote: post #35
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the saddest aspects of our societies being optimized for maximum short-term gains. In the past, master craftsman would own their own shop and pass it down to their apprentices, leaving a tradition and legacy that could last hundreds of years. This dynamic is becoming increasingly rare.

On the other hand, doing the same work (let alone the same job) for all of my adult life would be actual spirit-breaking torture for me. I respect people who can do it, who can live a simple life doing the same thing every single day and be happy about it. Sometimes I wish I had that ability. But it is very much _not_ me.

I used to think the same way. Well, I still think it I guess, but different perspective on it nowadays. People always asked me how I didn't get bored just sitting in front of the computer all day, all they saw was "Sitting in front of computer" so of course it looked the same to them. But to me it's a world of difference between what you do on the computer so no, spending 12 hours in front of the computer was never boring, there are countless of different things you could be doing.

Then I caught myself thinking the same way about the fisherman that lives next door, who I pass every day and he sits and does something with his fishing nets. To me, it all looks the same way, so I asked myself how he can sit every day doing the same thing, over and over again. Asking him about it, apparently it's not so "the same" every day to him, as depending on the expected weather and what not, he prepares the net differently, and sometimes tries new things for various reasons. Maybe he is bored after all these years, I never asked, but I learned not to assume at least that things might look the same from the outside, but the person might be having a completely different perspective on it.

Like a taxi driver, it's just "driving all day" right? For a lot of people, seemingly this brings them a "no day is ever the same" experience and they love it and don't see any repetition, at least lots of drivers I've talked to felt this way.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#43

Post by senordevnyc »

embedding-shape wrote: post #38
rvz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on... My comment was not made "hours ago". It was made 3 days (2026-08-29) before this post reached the front page. You can hover over the "hours ago" link and the timestamp does not match the title. Why is the timestamp of my comment (and many others) of this post manipulated? Was this post recently merged with another duplicate?

"second-chance" pool or the "repost invited" pool. Seems it's not on https://news.ycombinator.com/invited so "second-chance" seems to be what happened. Introduced a mere 5 years ago :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 Interesting you've been here at least since then and haven't noticed it before, happens relatively often, dare I say at least once a day?

Yeah, but that's different from what they're talking about. It looks like the code for comment timestamps has a bug where the human-readable version keys off the updated story timestamp or something?

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#44

Post by embedding-shape »

senordevnyc wrote: post #43
embedding-shape wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"second-chance" pool or the "repost invited" pool. Seems it's not on https://news.ycombinator.com/invited so "second-chance" seems to be what happened. Introduced a mere 5 years ago :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 Interesting you've been here at least since then and haven't noticed it before, happens relatively often, dare I say at least once a day?

Yeah, but that's different from what they're talking about. It looks like the code for comment timestamps has a bug where the human-readable version keys off the updated story timestamp or something?

No, what happens when an old submission goes through that invited/second-chance process is that any comments made on the submission would have their timestamps updated, so comments I left days ago, could show up as being made hours/minutes ago, although I didn't personally repost them. Exactly what parent describes.

I'm guessing HN either by choice or by accident shows the "original timestamp" in that title attribute, while the user-facing rendering shows the newly bumped timestamp.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#45

Post by johnwalkr »

KPGv2 wrote: post #26
bob1029 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad but at the same time there is a sort of optimization that tends to occur each time the magic trick is rediscovered. Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose. How would you write a document that describes to som…

You don't need to write it down to pass the knowledge down to an apprentice. Your bicycle case is a great example. People don't learn to ride a bike from a book. They receive in-person instruction of exactly the type the comment you're responding to was writing about.

One interesting thing about riding a bike is that to turn right, you must initially turn the handlebars to the left (called countersteering). This is subconscious, not explicitly taught and virtually everyone disbelieves this at first when told. But it's something that needs to "click" in order to ride a bike. It's the reason it is so hard to ride a carnival trick bike with a gear added to reverse the handlebar/steering relationship; you don't consciously know how to change your input. There's even some videos by bike youtubers that learn to ride a bike with reverse steering, including the subconscious countersteering part. When they switch back to a normal bike, it once again takes time to relearn.

To relate this back to the comment thread, people don't even always know the full extent of what they have learned.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#46

Post by somenameforme »

Towaway69 wrote: post #9
bob1029 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad but at the same time there is a sort of optimization that tends to occur each time the magic trick is rediscovered. Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose. How would you write a document that describes to som…

You speak of tacit knowledge[1] Worse is that they who have the knowledge don't realise that others don't know what they know, it's completely automatic and ingrained to the owner. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

There's nothing implied about tacit knowledge being knowledge that you don't know others don't have. For instance in chess mastery, one is fully aware that you simply see the board in a different way. It's not like you're aloof of your own 'advantage', but then in lessons you work to gradually, step by step, instill such in the student. Some of the most successful teachers are those who themselves learned the game a bit later than average, enabling them to draw more heavily on their own path. For instance Mark Dvoretsky only earned the IM title when he was 28!

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#47

Post by Blackthorn »

embedding-shape wrote: post #5

How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every…

Some people do a lot as least. Forrest Addy has a massive library of posts that are still the top results on Google for just about any machining problem imaginable.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#48

Post by colechristensen »

Blackthorn wrote: post #47
embedding-shape wrote: post #5

How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every…

Some people do a lot as least. Forrest Addy has a massive library of posts that are still the top results on Google for just about any machining problem imaginable.

A small curated "best of" list of links wouldn't go unappreciated :)

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#49

Post by zulgin »

rhplus wrote: post #34
embedding-shape wrote: post #5

How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every…

> unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a 777 doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated a…

There is a famous story about how an F16 got grounded because an half inch metal pin was missing from the cockpit canopy. Nobody knew what the pin did or if it was even necessary but you can't fly a plan that 'missing a part'. After several days of being grounded they finally reached out to a guy who had retired 20 years ago who told them the pin was a part of a analogue sensor that had been replaced nearly 30 years ago. Only the pin remained as a vestigial organ since it was part of the airframe design.

It doesn't matter how well you document things there will always be tribal / personal knowledge.

Even if stuff is written down you have to know where to look.

Re: American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died

#50

Post by cucumber3732842 »

1718627440 wrote: post #31
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is not the "only" reason people do things. But it sure helps. Would we have nearly as many slime-balls scheming up ways to plaster ads upon everyone's eyeballs and record our every movement and click if not for the money in it? At a societal level almost nothing ever gets done at scale if there isn't money in it. You remove the financial incentive and things atrophy, new investment stops replacing old, etc.

Sure, but the incredible skilledness in a single craft, which we are discussing here, doesn't happen at a societal level. That is the hard work of an individual and has always been.

At the societal level it's a numbers game. These people are the end of a very long tail. If you reduce the area under the curve you also reduce the long tail.
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