Comment by IfOnlyYouKnew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IfOnlyYouKnew | Hacker News Reader

Langewiesche is a terrific writer, but it does seem like the overwhelming majority of people in the business consider his take on the 737MAX to be misguided.

Reading his article, I got the impression that he has a certain idealised image of what a pilot should be like. One that I have also noticed quite a few people here on HN seem to be rather fond of.

Namely: that being a pilot should not just be someone's job, but their calling. To use a weird phrase I once saw here, they are supposed to be "fixed-wing enthusiasts".

There also seems to be a certain, somewhat outdated, concept of masculinity at play here. And, of course, combining these expectations with stereotypes of African and Asian companies (and people) initially led many to the conclusion that these pilots were either incompetent ("because of a lack of calories in early childhood" to quote one line of reasoning I saw (luckily not here)) or incapable of independent thinking. Never mind that at least one of the captains was trained in the US.

These ideas couldn't be farther from how the system is actually evolving, and how it should be: Flying needs to be boring. If your pilot has a chance to become a hero, the system has already failed. The goal must be a system of technology, institutions, curricula, etc. that makes it perfectly safe to trust any decent high school student to become a competent(-enough) pilot. Candidates with a sense for adventure should be screened out, because flying an airliner is dreadfully boring, and a volatile personality will soon find a way to make it more exciting (drinking, usually).

And planes should become more and more automated. Software and design errors tend to occur just once. Humans tend to make mistakes, even repeatedly, even with the best training. The 737MAX disaster is a terrible outlier that shouldn't obfuscate the fact that in the last 50 years or so, airline fatalities have dropped by an order of magnitude, even thought miles traveled have increased by a similar magnitude.

Combining the two: air travel today is 50 to 100x safer than it was in the golden age of piloting so many seem to glorify.

Exactly this.

The Langewiesche legacy goes back to his father Wolfgang Langewiesche, who is also a terrific writer, incidentally about probably still the best book about flying fixed wings, Stick and Rudder (1936).

But flying has moved on a lot since then. Although I also appreciate "The story of Mel", computing has moved on so far from moving some bits and bytes on a drum memory, that I absolutely prefer someone writing readable code today to someone who produces unreadable, but performant code (spare a few niches of inner loop optimization).

The same goes for flying back now and then. When there's not just "Stick and Rudder" in a modern airplane, but caring for massively diverse aspects such as ATC, passenger air quality, airspace control or fuel optimization, I don't need specialists. I need competent generalists.

Of course it makes for a nice hero story if a pilot just makes it to the runway because they took an airliner into a forward slip like the Gimli Glider, but the point is that they absolutely should not have to.

Humans are not meant for sensing to fly. The average VFR pilot loses not just orientation, but control over the airplane an average of around 178 seconds (!) after going into a cloud.

We need less heroes and more engineers who can build reliable automated safety systems.

(Explanation for anybody who isn't a pilot or up to their nose in this stuff:)

VFR is Visual Flight Rules, meaning the pilot's training and the paperwork qualifying them to fly is only for when you can see where you're going. The other case is IFR Instrument Flight Rules, which means you need to learn to ignore your brain's guess as to where it is and how it's moving and trust the (redundant but not necessarily infallible) instruments to tell you what's happening. You still look outside the plane, because there might be something important to see (e.g. geese!) but you mostly are scanning your instruments, seeking confirmation that everything continues to be good, the instruments don't disagree with each other or with the pilot's understanding of what's supposed to be happening.

VFR qualified pilots are not supposed to go near clouds at all. The exact distances vary depending on where the plane is exactly (low, slow flying planes get to be closer than higher, fast moving planes) but the general principle is that you need to stay so far from all clouds that you can easily see anything coming out of a cloud and avoid it entirely, since under VFR you are relying primarily on what you can see. Unfortunately they sometimes stray into clouds, and 178 seconds isn't very long.

Obviously the people flying a Max will all be IFR qualified (the commercial pilot licensing doesn't have a VFR option) but the parent's point is true anyway - we are already training pilots not to try to fly by instinct because humans do not have appropriate instincts for flying, we are earthbound.

The commercial pilot rating does not require an instrument rating, but the ATP does. All airline pilots will have an ATP; the commercial rating is an earlier step along the pilot certification path.

Good point.

If flying becomes boring, it becomes a tedious job that requires a lot of mental fortitude to slog through. Boring jobs are dangerous, because human beings don’t do boring very well.

And I think we’ve already reached that point in aviation, as much of the work has been offloaded to automated systems, making it easy for attention to doze elsewhere, and making transitions to where manual intervention is unexpectedly required even more difficult. It’s the same with self driving cars: the only safe options seem to be no automation and all automation since humans simply don’t do boring very well.

Exactly this.

Statistically the most common cause of car crashes is driver fatigue.

Forcing undivided attention toward a boring subject for prolonged periods always results in cognitive fatigue.

I guarantee fatigue would be a similarly common occurrence in plane crashes caused by pilot error.

Either our planes should be flying themselves, or our pilots should be given cocaine before takeoff

You know which planes crash the most? Tiny planes with less than 6 passengers. Almost no automation, and by god are the pilots excited while they plow into the ground through their own error.

Unfair. A single propeller engine vs redundant jets.

What's unfair about it? GA pilots manage to kill themselves in twin engine planes too, fewer of them because most of them only own single engine planes in the first place, but plenty.

They make mistakes, and in particular some of these are mistakes that are more likely when you're flying for your own reasons (usually leisure) rather than because it's a job. "Get-there-itis" is an example, an airline pilot sees the weather at Nashville looks too dodgy, they confer with their colleague, then divert. "Sorry ladies and gentlemen, looks like Nashville's having some attrociously bad weather this evening, we're going to get you on the ground at... Charlotte and make alternative arrangements". But a private pilot father who promised to attend his daughter's performance this evening is damned if he'll divert and miss it, he's going to land at his intended destination. When he realises he might miss the performance by being dead, it's too late.

Yet how many crashes are due to engine failure? I have a friend who is a flight instructor on small planes, and he describes most general aviation crashes as being due to insufficient/improper preparation: not being aware of weather conditions, skipping safety checks, etc. Pressure (from passengers or the pilot themselves) to arrive at a destination by a specified deadline also play a role: a flight should always be delayed if there are concerns about weather, equipment, etc. Commercial aviation has an advantage, here: the layers of bureaucracy prevent passengers from interacting with the people deciding whether to delay or cancel a flight (I'm not even sure who makes that call: is it the pilots, or someone in a central office somewhere?).

Of course unexpected catastrophic failures do occur, but I've not seen any statistics that claim that they are a prevalent cause of general aviation crashes.

All that being said, in the case of the MAX, I find it unfathomable to blame pilot error, given the lack of training on the MCAS system.

wrt flight cancelations, etc.

> I'm not even sure who makes that call: is it the pilots, or someone in a central office somewhere?

The relevant regulation is here,

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/121.533

The "operational control" is jointly shared between the pilot in command and the aircraft dispatcher. In theory, either one can cancel the flight. In practice the dispatcher does it or a shift duty manager (who may not be actually performing dispatch duties) who is the "man behind the curtain" and oversees all flight operations during their dirty duty shift. Big carriers may have several managers, assigned per region (CONUS, Asia Pacific, Europe-Trans Atlantic, etc.) but the theory is the same.

[me: licensed dispatcher & former flight ops duty manager]

This is a very strange perspective to me. Clearly making flying boring has tremendously reduced the number of incidents. Certainly it's true that making something boring will increase the incident rate...but what's overwhelmingly clear from the data is that the reduction in incidents from all that automation dwarfs that effect.

The problem is that both statements are true.

Yes, we want flying to be as boring as possible, and yes making flying this boring has been the result of the amazing success of making flying safe.

Yes, with flying so boring, when something exciting does happen it's in many senses more of a problem.

This is a, maybe the fundamental dilemma in aviation safety today. Part of the solution is lots and lots of simulator training. Which of course is a problem when the manufacturer claims that there is no need for simulator training, because everything is exactly the same.

Boring for the passenger doesn’t mean boring for the pilot. A bus driver has to drive the bus, it’s routine yet never the same thing, their day goes by pretty fast. Compare to someone watching over an automated train...it’s just time they spend twiddling their thumbs, time crawls, they get really bored.

Flying is becoming less like flying a bus and more like supervising an automated train, and that is what is dangerous. When something unusual happens, the pilots are surprised and unable to adjust quickly, because unusual isn’t usual.

Of course, if unusual happens all the time, or is too out of the norm, you are pretty screwed, exciting is more dangerous than boring, but it doesn’t make boring less dangerous.

Pilots still have a lot to do, they must monitor the radios, the weather, fuel, etc. Since plenty of accidents have been caused by not paying attention to these things, I don't think you can say that having more time to do them is a bad thing.

If there is a lack of manual flying ability it is entirely due to culture and not the aircraft. Pilots can and do turn off the autopilot if they want to practice, and most landings are done manually because it is softer.

Langewiesche himself wrote about exactly this paradox in this (excellent) piece on the Air France 447 crash:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...

Old saw, true enough: "Anesthesiology is 99% boredom and 1% panic."

Corollary: We had a senior anesthesiology resident who, a few months before completing his 3 years of training and going out into the great world to make his fortune, STILL came back to the ready room at the end of every day and said, "Something really interesting happened today." Us attendings hated working with this guy. Why? Because by the end of your residency, interesting events in the OR should be the exception rather than the rule.

>If your pilot has a chance to become a hero, the system has already failed.

Very well said.

Isn’t that question also true for any large Corporation?

Flying is boring when everything works well. I remember a story from a friend, a pilot of an airline that was going to sell all its aircraft of a model. 6 month before the sell, the preventive maintenance was reduced to only the legal minimum. In each flight during this 6 month, my friend has encountered technical issues (sometimes as severe as a broken reactor). IMHO, the role of a pilot is to keep a cool head to analyze faults with sometimes slight symptoms and find the right answers occasionally in opposition to the manual. That's also why I want the pilot to be in the same aircraft as me (no remote piloting).

> Never mind that at least one of the captains was trained in the US.

Point of fact, that captain did initial private pilot training in San Carlos in Cessnas — his airline training was at the airline. “US trained” in this context is similar to a doctor being “US trained” because he did an undergraduate degree in the US but his medical degree somewhere else.

This is completely wrong. If you watch air crash investigation, the majority of pilots who saved planes under extreme circumstances were fixed wing enthusiasts, often flew small planes or gliders for fun.

Especially in situations like the MAX crashes you need a feeling for the aircraft.

I'm astonished what this has to do with masculinity, which is of course not outdated (watch who women date ...).

"Namely: that being a pilot should not just be someone's job, but their calling. To use a weird phrase I once saw here, they are supposed to be "fixed-wing enthusiasts"."

Rotary-wing enthusiasts are just crazy. Everybody knows that.

My takeaway from the letter is that pilots should be at the top of there game at all times, and one shouldn't be cheap when building an airplane. Blaming pilots for a shoddy aircraft is weak sauce, and Sulli wantd us to know that.

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