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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

To add a human element to this story, I'm from north of Pittsburgh and the crash of flight 427 is one of the events from my childhood that I can determinedly recall. One of my classmates--eight or nine years old--lost her father in that crash. Our class planted a tree outside our middle school with a plaque to memorialize him. I bother saying this only because, while air travel is impressively safe overall (hats off to the FAA and NTSB), it's natural to mentally dismiss a mere ("mere") 132 deaths in the grand scheme of things without pausing to consider the broader ripples such an event has on history.

If you'd like to experience a moment of somber horror, Wikipedia has a computer reconstruction of the final moments of the plane based on the recordings recovered from the black box: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USAir_Flight_427_Chase.og...

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I ended up finding my way to that after reading TFA and Googling 427.

Not just that, but the fact that they had audio all the way down, and the pilots utter disbelief that they plane was responding to his inputs in the way that it was.

The idea that they were not actually supposed to pull up in the scenario but leave the stick level and just turn hard right is unbelievable. The amount of training to be able to react like that instinctively would be tremendous.

The plane hit 3 or 4 G and apparently the copilot could be heard straining on the tape. They were analyzing the pilot’s gasping to deduce how he way applying rudder because the black box didn’t record rudder inputs at the time.

All of this is inconceivable. The sheer speed of the event and how quickly that 30 second video is over is probably the most shocking.

This one showing the pilot inputs is even more terrifying:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/USAir_Fl...

Also from Pittsburgh, and my wife lost her dad in this crash.

The top comment on this thread (re: "acceptable loss"), is infuriating.

> The top comment on this thread (re: "acceptable loss"), is infuriating.

Do you ever drive a car? Do you think the risk is "acceptable"?

And don't get hung up on semantics, "acceptable" doesn't mean it's not terrible, it means that it's not feasible to prevent every risk with that danger:cost ratio. Especially because anything that causes a drastic reduction in flight will increase car trips and probably cause more deaths.

This is of course different from someone lying about the level of risk. But some risks really are "acceptable".

Get out from behind your computer and talk to people for once.

It's easy to explain to people in the real world how treating life as having infinite value is actually impossible, and nobody actually does it.

Also, the "acceptable" part is the statistical average. It's still a tragedy that any particular person dies. I do have sympathy for you and your wife, but we have millions of deaths per year that deserve equal respect, and we only have so much we can do to prevent each one. We should try very hard, but we can't try infinitely hard.

There's always a tradeoff. We could make driving much safer by enforcing drastically lower legal speed limits, much longer mandatory training for the drivers and even higher safety standars in cars. But we have chosen not to, because that would be perceived as limiting freedom, being inconvenient and cost money. But more than thirty thousand people die in car accidents every year in the US alone.

Reading both of your comments, one has to wonder if your wife and their classmate were one in the same.

Very Probable! @Kibwen what part of town was your friend from (not asking for a name on purpose I’m uninterested in sharing my wife’s name here, however easy it may be to google).

My next door neighbor died in this crash (flight 427). I'm from Virginia. I remember this crash vividly and I was only 10 at the time.

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