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Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

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Re: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

#81

Post by masklinn »

wat10000 wrote: post #63
amelius wrote: post #31

With all the high speed trains in Europe, I'm wondering why we don't see more security around them. It seems a much easier target than airplanes.

This story is a good example of one major reason: trains are way more robust. Imagine a similar catastrophic fire in the cockpit of a high speed train. Worst case, you hit the emergency stop and then evacuate the train. The only person who would be at risk would be the train driver. Have that fire in an airplane and everyone on board dies. This incident wasn't a terrorist attack, but the same idea applies there. The…

> Worst case, you hit the emergency stop

You don't even need to do that, because most trains and pretty much every high-speed train has some sort of dead man's switch, so the driver leaving their seat would automatically enable emergency brake in short order as they would if the driver had e.g. fallen unconscious.

Re: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

#82

Post by masklinn »

fragmede wrote: post #35
shepherdjerred wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing it’s because you can’t fly a train into a building

given how long and heavy trains are, and how fast they can go, and the fact that rails aren't straight, sure you can. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-texas-el-paso/news/20... a train crashed into the chamber of commerce building in Pecos Tx 5 days ago.

2 dead (both United Pacific employees, I assume train crew) and 3 light injuries from a train crashing into a truck, derailing, and hitting a building I think is pretty good evidence that using a train as your kinetic delivery is not a great way to do terrorism.

Re: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

#83

Post by [deleted] »

mmooss wrote: post #70
23B1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The former are interesting topics to be sure, but have very little to do with with active engagement in modern society.

Thanks for clarifying. IMHO history and the fall of Rome in particular seem among the most valuable topics today!

[deleted]

Re: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

#84

Post by eddywebs »

qingcharles wrote: post #72

This is wild to me: "Even though passengers have been forbidden from smoking on airplanes for 25 years, the rules about smoking in the cockpit are less straightforward, and international regulations appear to invest the captain with the authority to decide whether smoking will be allowed or not."

Sounds like rule made by smoking captains for the smoking captains.

Re: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

#85

Post by lazide »

eddywebs wrote: post #84
qingcharles wrote: post #72

This is wild to me: "Even though passengers have been forbidden from smoking on airplanes for 25 years, the rules about smoking in the cockpit are less straightforward, and international regulations appear to invest the captain with the authority to decide whether smoking will be allowed or not."

Sounds like rule made by smoking captains for the smoking captains.

It’s good to be the king?

Re: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

#86

Post by lazide »

ngneer wrote: post #55
Dalewyn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like how you can't convince a businessman to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it, it's next to impossible to "find out" a mystery if the powers-that-be do not want that and/or want a more desirable-for-them conclusion.

I was afraid you were going to say that ;). Thanks for the sage advice. I think that "safety inspector" would not be a good career choice for people like myself, then. Methinks Boeing and OceanGate had been in the news recently with similar safety attitudes. Oh, well. Live and learn.

Notably, the type of people who do B are extremely dangerous around anything involving engineering, science, etc - anything where reality actually matters.

Because type A people are what are required to actually fix problems, or learn more things.

Type B people exist when those are ‘not desirable’. Which should indeed scare you, if you care about actual reality (or actual reality matters) in that domain.

Re: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

#88

Post by Ozzie_osman »

ngneer wrote: post #13

A rather well-written piece. My takeaway is that the French investigators are pros and the Egyptians are hacks. And that safety culture matters. One must not bend the facts to draw a desired conclusion. One must review the data without bias, or else recuse oneself.

It's easy to say this sitting in the west, especially since Egypt is run by an authoritarian government. I'll point out though that even sans-authoritarianism, there are plenty of examples of Western "investigators" arriving at politicized and often false conclusions with far worse consequences. The history of the CIA/FBI is chock-full of examples. And you don't even have to go that far back or dig that deep... The whole Iraq WMD debacle.

Anyway, not saying the Egyptian investigators were right in this case (it seems clear that they weren't). Or defending authoritarian governments. Just providing an alternative view point, as someone who lived half his life in Egypt and half in the US.

Re: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

#89

Post by Ozzie_osman »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #22
ngneer wrote: post #13

A rather well-written piece. My takeaway is that the French investigators are pros and the Egyptians are hacks. And that safety culture matters. One must not bend the facts to draw a desired conclusion. One must review the data without bias, or else recuse oneself.

> My takeaway is that the French investigators are pros and the Egyptians are hacks Describing them as "hacks" is weird. In most dictatorships, the concern is usually "What does the country's leadership want the official story to be" rather than "What actually happened". Take this quote from the article for example > "In my opinion, the problem with the report is that it appears to treat the findings of the Triple Co…

> In most dictatorships, the concern is usually "What does the country's leadership want the official story to be" rather than "What actually happened".

This also occasionally happens in non-dictatorships, unless you considered George W a dictator when he was deciding to invade Iraq.

Re: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804

#90

Post by inglor_cz »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #77
dash2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might get the causality backward. Most high trust societies were high trust before, not after, they became democracies.

I think most democracies were founded as such and so the society and democracy were born at the same time

Nope, democracies are usually much younger than the underlying societies.

For example, the vast majority of Europe is now democratic. 200 years ago, most of Europe was autocratic and even exceptions like the UK were at most very incomplete democracies with limited suffrage.

But the constituent nations and ethnicities are very much the same, even though political boundaries have shifted; an English, Polish or Spanish person can read 200 year old texts without much effort. There wasn't any seismic shift comparable to the collapse of the Roman world and the subsequent rearrangement of nations and ethnicities across the continent. Krakow is still Polish, Budapest is still Hungarian and Milan is still Italian.

Only in a few places like Breslau/Wroclaw there was a meaningful population shift.

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