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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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]

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