Hacker News Reader

The core of the discussion precisely revolves around Boeing wilfully making it more difficult for the person in the cockpit to oversee the planes' automated systems.

View on HN

It would not be invalid to observe that the first Lion Air crew dealt successfully with the malfunction, and ask why the second crew did not. Every aspect of these accidents should be investigated.

The first crew had three members.

If I recall correctly, the first crew encountered the issue during cruise, at which point which you have both (a) time, and (b) sufficient altitude that you can afford to push the stick forward in order to reduce the aerodynamic force on the horizontal stabiliser to the point where it will be physically possible to correct the trim without powered assistance.

Pilots encountering the issue during takeoff have neither of those things, with results that we've already observed.

This is probably it, but even if not, there's a large amount of randomness in these kinds of situations, so it's not clear you'd be able to derive anything meaningful at all. Disasters are a highly complex, multi-factor, chaotic phenomenon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com