Comment by unionemployee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unionemployee | Hacker News Reader

For a time, I instructed airline pilots in simulators. The aircraft I taught had a similar mechanism with a "cutout switch" like this Boeing. Often, even when they knew it was coming, the pilots would fail to immediately shut down the system when given a related emergency situation, similar to this one. After learning more about this crash, I immediately thought of the tens of times I've seen this happen in the simulator. Sometimes, I'd pause it and ask the pilots if they've realized their error, other times, I'd simply let them crash (poor instructing on my part). In a previous post, this opinion was called racism/profiling, however, I maintain that extreme incompetence exists in many SE Asian airlines. The particular airline for which I instructed (in the US) had many low-ability pilots, and the reaction of these Lion Air pilots matches theirs exactly. We need to increase automation and, little by little, continue to remove the pilot from the equation until we have pilotless/single-pilot commercial aircraft. Humans simply aren't meant to "become the machine", which is essentially what we're asking airline pilots to do.

Trying to "remove the pilot from the equation" is exactly what caused this crash, by giving primacy to this automatic trim adjustment system over the pilot's control inputs. We need to design systems that are more respectful of the pilot's input (in particular, that respond to the pilot's obvious intent rather than requiring the pilot to use some unusual cutout switch to achieve the most basic aeroplane functionality of: push stick forward => pitch down and vice versa).

I'd consider that even more dangerous. Stick pushers actually activate before the plane stalls. These large aircraft are designed in a way that a full stall could be catastrophic. Stick shaker events (the thing that happens before the stick pusher) happen quite frequently due to pilot inattention. In this case, an accident occurred, however, more frequently, they save lives.

A traditional stick pusher is a much better design: the pilot has clear visibility into what's happening, they can see that the plane is pitching down because the stick is being pushed forward. Pilots do make mistakes but so do automated systems; the way forward is to build systems that collaborate with the pilot rather than cutting the pilot out.

If the aircraft were being piloted manually, this crash wouldn't have happened. The increasing imposition of automation and removing the pilot from the equation was the cause of this crash. Your recommendation is to take this further, rapidly?

First of all he said little by little so calling it rapid is a bit misleading. Second this was not ultimately a hardware/software failure but the failure of the overall supervisor of the system(= pilot). We can't (yet) make hardwares that are immune to failure but we have redundancy and procedures to deal with these failures. It seems like in this case the procedures were not properly executed which lead to the tragedy. To also address @lmm's point: the leading cause for aircraft accidents are human error and not hardware/software failure so more automation = less accidents. Edit: after reading some more on the subject it seems like boeing share some of the blame for not including the new system(or system changes) in their training program which is again a human error.

Is pilot error more or less of a cause of fatal aircraft incidents than automation gone awry? What does the data say?

The FAA thinks that cockpit automation leads to complacency. It's a question on the commercial pilot written test.

There's a talk on youtube (Children of Magenta, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10) given to an audience of pilots, it's a complicated issue.

> We need to increase automation and, little by little, continue to remove the pilot from the equation until we have pilotless/single-pilot commercial aircraft.

there seems to be a growing consensus in the self-driving car debate that incremental automation is actually pretty dangerous, or at least much less safe than either fully manual or fully autonomous control, to the point where some consider it irresponsible to sell L3 autonomous vehicles at all. is there a particular reason why planes should be different?

I have never understood what problem self-driving cars is trying to solve. I can, on the other hand, see that it could be more desirable to have self flying planes. But to even think that self flying = issue free and non crashable planes is beyond naive. Personally I believe that the best is to let humans do what they do best, and let computers do what they are good at. Without trying to force one into the other's shoes. (Computers has shoes, don't they?)

Self driving cars solve two problems: 1. driving is boring, 2. driving can lead to accidents if you are not attentive at the right moment.

That's why the get into the simulator, so they can learn good habit. This has nothing to do with pilots, but with humans and losing track of time when trying to troubleshoot something.

I recommend folks read "Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes"

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