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Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

ntsb.gov

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Re: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

#51
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest US pilots union opposes it on pilot privacy grounds. (To be clear, I think having an expectation of vocal privacy while you are in charge of an airliner is absurd.)

Do you have a voice recording of you doing your entire job, every day of your life?

No, but I'm also not driving hundreds of souls around near mach 1 strapped to 100k gallons of jet fuel. And when I've worked in government environments I had escorts watching my screen like a hawk the entire time.

Not to mention the tapes are only pulled if there's an incident. You could even have a little tamper seal on it to show if it's been downloaded. This is absurd.

Re: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

#52
post #24

The fact that a critical piece of the evidence was cell phone photos sent between workers coordinating door re-assembly doesn't exactly instill a whole lot of confidence in their permit-to-work process. I didn't like it when it was medical teams doing shift handover via a Google Doc, and I don't like it when it's a matter of flight safety either. Or, as Homer might eruditely say: "guess I forgot to put the bolts back…

This is a puzzling attitude to me. Every time we technologists see a crappy proprietary solution being used for a problem, the first exclamation is, "why not use ? That's so dumb, they spent $10k on that tool when they could have spent $100 on X!" There must be a middle ground here- the paradox is that Google, Apple, etc have this ability to generate user friendly software and hardware at scale. But they aren't consi…

[deleted]

Re: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

#54
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did this pass Boeing QA? https://www.airlinepilotforums.com/safety/146074-boeing-inte...

Just comment out the tests and they pass

I’m trying to convince a group of devs that catching (and ignoring) every exception is not actually a solution to their crash bugs.

Re: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

#55
A very thorough preliminary report. I've worked for a long time in quality systems, and this is a perfect example of a systemic failure. They've got work being handed off between Boeing employees and 3rd party contractors with insufficient controls in place to verify that very basic tasks are being performed.

I'd be curious to know how many non-conformances they typically see during assembly of a plane and whether management is actually allowing the quality department sufficient independence to investigate these issues and fully resolve them. I'm guessing that the production personnel are under tremendous time constraints and are constantly pressure the quality assurance people to sign off on whatever paperwork is holding up the line, no matter the safety implications.

Also, I think a lot of middle and upper level management needs to lose their jobs over this. I hope this mess ends up in textbooks and gets beaten into the head of every MBA student in the country.

Re: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

#56
post #19

Depressurization happened around 17:12:33 PST but the aircraft continued to climb until 17:13:41 PST, and the autopilot was configured for 10k ft at 17:13:56 PST. Why did it take the pilots a full minute to begin an emergency descent after the failure? I would expect that the nature of the accident would be clear nearly immediately, at least in the need to descend the aircraft.

You can't leave your assigned altitude/trajectory without coordinating with ATC. Otherwise you may collide with another plane, which would make a bad situation worse.

Sure you can, and they likely did start descending before contacting ATC. But before they did any of that, they had to spend some time donning their oxygen masks and doing a few other "memory items" before then descending.

Re: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

#57
post #19

Depressurization happened around 17:12:33 PST but the aircraft continued to climb until 17:13:41 PST, and the autopilot was configured for 10k ft at 17:13:56 PST. Why did it take the pilots a full minute to begin an emergency descent after the failure? I would expect that the nature of the accident would be clear nearly immediately, at least in the need to descend the aircraft.

More altitude means more time to work the problem.

Re: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

#58
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a voice recording of you doing your entire job, every day of your life?

No, but I'm also not driving hundreds of souls around near mach 1 strapped to 100k gallons of jet fuel. And when I've worked in government environments I had escorts watching my screen like a hawk the entire time. Not to mention the tapes are only pulled if there's an incident. You could even have a little tamper seal on it to show if it's been downloaded. This is absurd.

See also: police bodycams

If you have the capacity to end peoples' lives with an arm spasm I think your privacy should rightfully take a backseat.

Re: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

#59
post #19

Depressurization happened around 17:12:33 PST but the aircraft continued to climb until 17:13:41 PST, and the autopilot was configured for 10k ft at 17:13:56 PST. Why did it take the pilots a full minute to begin an emergency descent after the failure? I would expect that the nature of the accident would be clear nearly immediately, at least in the need to descend the aircraft.

You can't leave your assigned altitude/trajectory without coordinating with ATC. Otherwise you may collide with another plane, which would make a bad situation worse.

In an emergency you can do anything you think is necessary to address it. Source: I’m a private pilot.

Re: Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

#60
post #13

> The accident airplane was required to be equipped with a CVR that retained, at minimum, the last 2 hours of audio information, including flight crew communications and other sounds inside the cockpit. >The CVR was downloaded successfully; however, it was determined that the audio from the accident flight had been overwritten. The CVR circuit breaker had not been manually deactivated after the airplane landed follow…

The rule (edit: in Europe) is now 25 hours for aircraft over a certain weight, though it is not (currently) retroactively applied to existing equipment. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/12/04/2023-26...

That document is an in-progress proposal to amend a rule, no? I think there was strong opposition to this rule before this accident flight, and the blowback from the missing data here might be strong enough to be able to get it passed anyway.
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