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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Something about this piece doesn't smell right. The author claims to be a pilot with 45 years of experience, writing in a publication that bills itself as "by pilots, for pilots", but I'm a pilot (with 23 years of experience) and I've never before heard a pilot refer to the yoke as "the wheel". ("If you don’t believe me, sit in a Bonanza A36 or Cessna 210, or just about any other high-performance piston airplane, and pull the wheel back while sitting still on the ramp.")

I'm also very skeptical of his thesis that these accidents were pilot error, that there is nothing different about the Max 8 than any previous generation of the 737. The 737 in general has an excellent safety record. The Max 8 has had two crashes within two years of its introduction. The odds of that just being a coincidence are pretty damn low.

So I can't help but wonder if this guy is a shill. Maybe the question we should be asking is: can pilots trust Boeing?

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From [this source], "McClellan has logged more than 10,000 hours as pilot-in-command, flying everything from a 1946 Cessna 140, his first airplane, to the Cessna 162 SkyCatcher and virtually all general aviation airplanes that have been in production over the past 30 years. He holds an ATP certificate for multi engine airplanes with type ratings in several business jets, has a commercial certificate for helicopters, and is a CFI-I."

[this source]: https://www.aviationpros.com/home/press-release/10393553/mac...

And the Cessna 140 has a yoke that looks like a (oblong) wheel. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a9/19...

Then you simply haven’t talked to many older pilots. Yoke, control wheel, wheel for short, they’re all the same fucking thing. This seems like a dumb way to shill, no?.

Look at the cockpit of a DC-3 or pretty much anything pre-war design that doesn’t use a stick.. it will educate you.

Also, Boeing is a multi billion dollar company.. if they’re going to shill I’m sure they’d have no trouble finding an actual pilot to do it for them. We’re not that rare.

And they were wheels in the days before power-boosted controls because you had to apply a fair amount of force in using them. Flying a WWII bomber in close formation for hours at a time was a physical job.

Pilots have reported several incidents of unexpected nose dive after putting autopilot on into FAA database. Even if pilots are trusted to fix things in very rare cases, doing it as a routine seems wrong.

Boeing had already fix in the pipeline (software fix and different instructions for pilots, updating the manual) but government shutdown seems to have delayed the FAA approval process.

> The odds of that just being a coincidence are pretty damn low.

To the statisticians of HN: I am genuinely curious. What are the odds of that? Do we model it as Poisson?

In another thread, someone said that one accident per 10 million flights is normal, and that this new model 737 has had 150k flights.

So, assuming an accident probability of 1/10000000 for each flight, and assuming that each flight is an independent event, then the probability of getting 2 or more accidents in 150k flights of normally functioning planes is 1/8978.23, if I've done the math correctly.

The probability of 1 or more accidents in 150k flights is 1/67.1679.

I have no idea how to interpret this. One of the challenges in statistics is asking the right questions, and I'm not sure that the questions I've answered are the right questions.

Same answers on the math. Using a binomial I got 1/9009 for 2+, mostly same answer for 1+ in 150k. Probably rounding differences. Also agreed on asking the right questions. Could be a 1/9000 event given a 1/10million safety expectation, or it could simply be a much more probable event given that our assumption of 1/10million is incorrect. Ironically it could also be that the new plane is even more safe, but we've just experienced an e.g. 1 in 50,000 event. There's lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Would it be worthwhile to compare to a daily risk that people take? e.g. what are the odds of getting hit by a car when crossing the road?

A "one in 10k" coincident would qualify as mildly interesting at most. We run into coicidences all the time and I think it needs to be about 1 in 1000 to even register as a coincident.

Is he talking about the trim wheel? I don't know much about airplanes but that seems possible to me. Would the trim wheel get the spring force feedback like the yoke?

Edit: here is a video of the trim wheel on a 737-300 https://vimeo.com/34501723

'Control Wheel' is enshrined in boeing terminology to the point that one of the autopilot modes on older 737s is 'CWS' for 'Control Wheel Steering'.

If you're mostly surrounded by boeing equipment for most of your career then it's likely to use the terminology that they use.

I suspect he knows what he is talking about but there is also a flaw in the MCAS that interferes with or prevents pilot correction.

The fact that it's called "Air Facts Journal" is suspicious.

It's well-known in the field. The name was chosen in 1938:

https://airfactsjournal.com/air-facts-history/

Good to know, thank you. Without context the name sounds very odd.

I signed up to get text messages about airplanes sent to my cell phone, and now they won't stop!

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