Preliminary report into Air India crash released • Hacker News Board

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#631

Post by justsid » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

zamadatix wrote: post #191

dboreham wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably time to design a plane that can't be sent into terrain in seconds by flipping a switch.

"Sent into terrain in seconds by flipping a switch" is both too inaccurate and feels too cursory to take as impetus for serious design criticism, especially when the extensive preliminary report explicitly does not recommend any design changes with the current information.

Hilarious how Hacker News routinely bashes software managers who don’t understand a problem space and give vague and impossible goals. But somehow “just don’t let an aircraft fly itself into the ground” is a reasonable statement.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#632

Post by lambdaone » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

anton-c wrote: post #612

bravesoul2 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your choice but safer to fly than drive the same journey. Commercial airliners anyway.

Yes I acknowledge this. But I also retain control to the very last moment. I don't have to bank on the driver of my vehicle not being suicidal. If I feel another driver is dangerous, I can just stop. This obviously doesnt prevent all accidents but I've never been in a serious one. That being said ive flown plenty of times. My fear comes from lacking any control and just finding out mid-flight were going down through…

You still have to rely on other drivers not being actually suicidal. Just to give one terrifying example scenario: you will pass hundreds, if not thousands of other drivers driving in the opposite direction in the course of a long journey. Any motorist driving in the opposing lane has the ability to engage other drivers in a head-on collision at any time by making a relatively trivial maneuver. Given human reaction times, and the very high closing velocity of such a collision, you ability to avoid this would seem to be non-existent. You certainly couldn't "just stop" to prevent it.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#633

Post by ExoticPearTree » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:38 PM UTC

wkat4242 wrote: post #584

xeonmc wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another one: Air Canada 143 - Pilot calculated incorrect fuel due to metric/imperial unit mixup, and ran out of fuel midair. - Said pilot performed an impossible glider-sideslip maneuver to rapidly bleed airspeed just-in-time for an emergency landing at an abandoned airfield, having to completely rely on eyeballing the approach. - No fatalties or serious injuries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvt7hP5a-0

It's not an impossible maneuver. Glider pilots do this all the time especially if they don't have spoilers

I would say it is much much harder. The wing configuration of an aircraft dictates the minimum glide speed. The more angled (for a better word) the wing, the higher the speed it needs to be at to be able to glide and not stall.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#634

Post by ExoticPearTree » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #28

bob1029 wrote: post #18

> The EGT was observed to be rising for both engines indicating relight. Engine 1’s core deceleration stopped, reversed and started to progress to recovery. Engine 2 was able to relight but could not arrest core speed deceleration and re-introduced fuel repeatedly to increase core speed acceleration and recovery. I know it's probably not worth the hazmat tradeoff for such a rare event, but the F-16 has an EPU powered…

I suspect any civil aviation engineer who goes "let's add hydrazine!" to fix problems has a fairly short career, lol.

To my knowledge, hydrazine is extremely toxic. Most likely no regulator will allow it on commercial aircraft.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#635

Post by ummonk » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

gosub100 wrote: post #489

ummonk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and the other pilot flipped the switches back on and one of the engines started spooling up but it was too late. Murder-suicide looks like the likely conclusion, given that flipping the cutoff switches requires a very deliberate action. That said, it's not entirely impossible that due to stress or fatigue the pilot had some kind of mental lapse and post-flight muscle memory (of shutting off the engines) kicked i…

> Murder-suicide looks like the likely conclusion But why cutoff the fuel instead of flying into terrain? It's such a passive action

For whatever reason, the Egypt Air 990 pilot initiated his murder-suicide by pulling the thrust to idle and then flipping the fuel cutoff switches.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#636

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:44 PM UTC

nosianu wrote: post #456

octo888 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WalterBright is not totally unfamiliar with the aviation world...: > Bright is the son of the United States Air Force pilot Charles D. Bright > Bright graduated from Caltech in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Aeronautical Engineering > He worked for Boeing for 3 years on the development of the 757 stabilizer trim system

So? The comparison still makes no sense. Those switches cannot be accidentally flipped, and they are in a place where the pilots' hands have no action to take at all during that period. That is very different from mixing up two similar weapons in a similar location. Location of the switches: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/c-gettyimag... Here is a video of a takeoff and climb in a 787: https://youtu.…

> Those switches cannot be accidentally flipped

Yes, unbelievable things can happen. There are crashes where the pilot got discombobulated and a crash resulted.

For another example, there are at least two crashes I recall (and I am sure there are many more) where the pilot pulled back to recover from a stall despite being trained endlessly to push forward to recover. (And they killed everyone on board.) Pilots get confused by what an alarm means, and do the wrong thing. Pilots assume the autopilot is on but they had accidentally turned it off. Sometimes people get crazy urges to do the wrong thing (there's a word for that: cacoethes).

These things are rare, but when there are millions of flights, rare things happen.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#637

Post by venusenvy47 » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

testemailfordg2 wrote: post #562

Three things:- 1) Pilot clearly said I didn't do it. 2) Report talks about the second switch being turned off in a second. 3) Known advisory on switches getting flipped. If you see these three together, it becomes easy to deduce that based on point 2, switch was not human induced as the actions required take more than a second. Next the third point, advisory was for this exact scenario which played out, though rare b…

If there was any worry that 787 switch lockouts are not working properly, wouldn't they release an immediate bulletin for inspections on all aircraft? It seems like the lack of any bulletins implies the lack of any suspicion on hardware problems.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#638

Post by breadwinner » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #629

Assuming this is a murder-suicide and not a mistake or malfunction somehow, it's very damning of the FAA's policy to revoke the pilot's licenses of anyone seeking treatment for mental health issues. This was in India and thus not FAA jurisdiction, but it still would be a case where an untreated mental health issue lead to hundreds of deaths. By making pilots choose between their careers & medical treatment (since the…

Wouldn't it be better to provide such pilots alternate career paths? That way they can still make a living and the traveling public is not placed under unnecessary risk.

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#639

Post by hinkley » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

interestica wrote: post #572

russdill wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read through the boeing procedures, if an engine fails just after take off you delay cutting throttle or hitting the cutoff until you have positive climb and pass a certain altitude. Specifically because a mistake here would be so incredibly catastrophic. The following number of steps and verbal cross checks for then shutting down the engine are quite daunting. Not something applicable here, but still interest…

That’s absolutely applicable here. It means that an engine cutoff shouldn’t be allowed at all during certain parts of flight. It’s not crazy to think that a design fix would be to prevent those engagements during certain parts of takeoff (a certain window). It’s fly by wire anyway so it could presumably be done programmatically. MCAS was basically made to prevent user input that would send the plane into a dangerous…

Do you mean the MCAS System that sent two planeloads of people to their deaths?

That MCAS system?

Re: Preliminary report into Air India crash released

#640

Post by jeswin » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

Here's another point of view: https://x.com/BDUTT/status/1944012769323626682

The four Indian pilots on her show are clearly not convinced that the pilots are to blame.

As they mention, it's important to know what else was spoken in the cockpit. Quite possible that there's more, and that might have implicated the pilots. However, if that's not the case, this is a very poorly worded report.