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JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

avherald.com

241–250 of 515 posts

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#241
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have this as an additional safety layer. You don’t need to update everything at once. If anything is able to react within seconds, it’s a computer.

This is a gross oversimplification. Yes, in this case, you do need to update everything at once. At least for a given aiport. All it takes is one plane, helicopter, fire truck, or baggage transport vehicle to screw with the assumptions of the system and jeopardize safety. No, computers aren't necessarily faster, assuming we want to achieve autonomy on the ground. Note that the average human reaction time to visual st…

[deleted]

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it could have helped the flight attendants to quickly determine the exits that are safe. For obvious reasons, ordering the evacuation, in conjunction with criteria such as which side and which doors is the Captain's job, or if the Captain is incapacitated, the First Officer. They will have access to far more data than the cabin crew will (e.g. whether the engines are safely shut down, circumstances on the ground th…

This is not at all obvious. The pilots can't look backwards and don't have eyes in the cabin. There have been cases of engine fires and failures where the pilots had to go into the passenger cabin to examine the damage. Communication is key, but comms might have been down, too. In cases like this the cabin crew have to be prepared to initiate an evacuation on their own, and they have to be prepared to choose which do…

> the cabin crew have to be prepared to initiate an evacuation on their own

Re-read my post, because your conclusion is saying exactly what I already said with your words "be prepared to".

To repeat what I said, but in simpler terms:

In an ideal world, the Flight Crew have the responsibility for ordering evacuation and the associated parameters. End of story, no argument.

BUT there is a well rehearsed, well practiced, protocol which surrounds this !

So, at one extreme, if the Cabin Crew cannot communicate with the Flight Deck, then the decision is clearly theirs.

But before the extreme, we have the obvious scenario .... Cabin Crew act as additional eyes and ears for Flight Crew.

BUT in this scenario we are back to my main point ... the buck stops at the Captain to make the decision !!! The Cabin Crew are telling the Captain what they see, its ultimately his call.

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#243
post #170
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 50%, sure, but 50% of a very small number. How many deaths do you expect keeping passengers from being distracted at these times would prevent? (I expect if you compare that to the number of people inconvenienced by the rule it's a terrible trade off.)

[flagged]

No personal attacks on HN, please.

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#244

Definitely better links than Daily Mirror out there, avherald.com unfortunately overwhelmed, but in terms of discussion: - Crazy how well the carbon fiber A350 held up given that it seems to have landed pretty much directly on a Dash 8 (RIP Coast Guard team). Looks like trading long term flammability for initial rigidity lived up to the design intent. - Excellent evacuation job, especially as it looks like on some vi…

Ok, we merged the comments into the submission of the avherald.com article. Thanks!

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#245

I'll speculate: this looks like textbook runway invasion where miscommunication leads to two different aircrafts being allowed on a runway at the same time. Reminds me of LATAM 2213, which led to the very first Airbus 320 neo being written off [1]. Essentially, clearance to enter a runway has to be expressively given and confirmed in non-ubiquitous language ("Flight ABC requesting clearance to enter runway 01"). Yet…

it is crazy to me that all of this still relies on humans giving verbal clearance over radio. Shouldn’t there be a universal standard to communicate clearances to the computer systems of the airplanes and other runway vehicles? And shouldn’t there be a small, well-tested core system that makes sure clearance never conflicts? How on earth does all this still depend on skilled individuals not making a mistake? We got o…

> Shouldn’t there be a universal standard to communicate clearances to the computer systems of the airplanes and other runway vehicles?

Communicating clearances” would actually be the easy part. The hard part is making sure that there actually is clearance. The system would need to be able to “see” the runway and to “know” about the flights that are permitted to use it in real-time. It would involve many computers, some in the air and some on the ground I assume. If the system failed the pilots would have to fall back onto something else, perhaps what they do today, so they’d still need training and practice. If a pilot made a mistake the system would need to be able to detect that and update everyone.

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#246
post #72
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 50%, sure, but 50% of a very small number. How many deaths do you expect keeping passengers from being distracted at these times would prevent? (I expect if you compare that to the number of people inconvenienced by the rule it's a terrible trade off.)

I once heard a wise doctor say that even if the chance of survival for a medical operation is either 10% or 90%, the practical chance the patient is battling is always 50% because he either lives or dies from that operation. Likewise, the chance of someone being in an aviation accident is close to nil (you're more likely to be in a car accident), but you are either going to be in an aviation accident or not (a 50% ch…

This is very silly. There are much better ways to express the idea that a binomial distribution is different than a multinomial or continuous one than to make up fake statistics.

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#247
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that LW post says what you think it's saying? It's coining the term "fallacy of large numbers" to apply to the situation where someone is incorrectly asserting their situation has sufficiently large numbers to apply "law of large numbers" style reasoning. I agree that 5 minutes to each of 1000 people, especially 5min on your phone on a plane, are less valuable than 5k minutes to one person. But I don't…

Maybe I'm mistaking that with "Law of truly large numbers" With a huge number, it is possible to make something look reasonable or un-reasonable. Wasting billions of hours of peoples time. Sounds bad, we should get rid of that. But that is also the time when people should be watching the safety video. Which can impact a few lives. Like remembering where the safety doors are. Maybe this is more along those lines. http…

> that is also the time when people should be watching the safety video

I thought we were talking about the most dangerous parts of a flight, takeoff and landing, which are not when the safety video (or presentation) happens?

> With a huge number, it is possible to make something look reasonable or un-reasonable. Wasting billions of hours of peoples time. Sounds bad, we should get rid of that.

I agree that we're not good at thinking about this kind of scale. I think a better way to make this at a scale that works well is to look at everything on a per-person basis. So if it saves one life per year (which I suspect is high) then we're balancing 10min of boredom against 0.0002 micromorts [1], in the same range as traveling 270ft by car. Someone who would rather ride 100mi in a car with their phone than 101mi in a car without their phone is already ok with this kind of risk. [2]

[1] 1 in 4.5B chance of death

[2] 230mi per micromort, so 100mi is 0.435 micromorts and 101mi is 0.439 for a difference of 0.004 micromorts. If the journey is 1.5hr then this is 9 rounds of trading off 10min of boredom for 0.0004 micromorts. Which is twice the risk of death we're positing in the airplane example.

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone here from one of the large CDN providers want to reach out to AV Herald and offer him some free services? It’s such a useful and informative resource. Too bad it’s super slow when accessed in AU/NZ and I guess outside US/EU.

Earlier today it was very slow, and often timing out, from the EU too. I haven't tried again since.

Guessing because this accident made it to mainstream news.

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more so: Keeping the shades open could have really made a significant difference in this case, because it could have helped the flight attendants to quickly determine the exits that are safe.

> it could have helped the flight attendants to quickly determine the exits that are safe. For obvious reasons, ordering the evacuation, in conjunction with criteria such as which side and which doors is the Captain's job, or if the Captain is incapacitated, the First Officer. They will have access to far more data than the cabin crew will (e.g. whether the engines are safely shut down, circumstances on the ground th…

Cabin crew play a critical role in informing the flight deck of external conditions especially fire that would preclude use of specific exits in an evacuation.

Re: JAL A359 at Tokyo collided with Coast Guard DH8C on runway and burst into flames

#250
post #72
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 50%, sure, but 50% of a very small number. How many deaths do you expect keeping passengers from being distracted at these times would prevent? (I expect if you compare that to the number of people inconvenienced by the rule it's a terrible trade off.)

I once heard a wise doctor say that even if the chance of survival for a medical operation is either 10% or 90%, the practical chance the patient is battling is always 50% because he either lives or dies from that operation. Likewise, the chance of someone being in an aviation accident is close to nil (you're more likely to be in a car accident), but you are either going to be in an aviation accident or not (a 50% ch…

By that logic, there's a 50/50 chance the sun will come up tomorrow.
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