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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

That quoted ground observer. Do they work for the NTSB or something?

I am 110% certain that if I saw a plane on fire in the sky, I would not have the presence of mind to remember the term "cloud deck", let alone the rest of those details.

Ground observer: "Good sir, I do say that the cloud deck was quite low so I didn't get a good look, but the engine was mildly louder than usual, and possibly had smoke, but perhaps not, and appeared to be under control the whole time."

Me, probably: "AAAAAAAAAAAAA PLANE ON FIRE IN THE SKY, RUN!!!"

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It's very likely that they're an AvHerald reader. It's the absolute de facto gold standard website in its field, and sensationalism and drama is not appreciated -- a large chunk of the usual audience are aviation professionals. My dad was a pilot, and I've got some few hours myself. You can bet that if either of us watched this event happen, we'd mentally be documenting it as best as we possibly can, both to try to predict any useful information (e.g should we try to move!), and for any subsequent investigation.

The excellent safety record of aviation originates from a detailed and pedantic paper trail that is written in blood. It's by learning as much as possible from every incident, without fear of censure or blame, that makes the skies safer for everybody.

I can draw some parallels between that and a healthy SRE culture. Except for the casualties, of course. Wondering if the first SREs who created the guidelines had aviation industry experience.

Aviation regulations are written in blood. SRE regulations are written in lost weekends.

Depends on what systems the SRE is managing or even on the downstream clients relying on their work. Around Y2K a bug took the out the emergency call application for the fire department in Berlin at midnight New Year’s Eve. People died because dispatch was not available. It’s an IT system where people die if you mess up. AFAIR in one of the earlier prolonged AWS outages, some sort of medical provider failed and people were at risk. It’s not all just display ads on websites.

Brent Chapman was one, and he worked in volunteer search and rescue.

low key feel opposite - chaos engineering (to an extent obvs) would benefit flight controls...

it's like that old experiment that i cant find source for - wall st traders switched with military guys and wall st outperformed mils because they are used to dealing with uncertain information...

> aviation originates from a detailed and pedantic paper trail that is written in blood

The saying is “aviation regulations are written in blood” because each new regulation is usually in response to crash. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/13081/why-do-pe...

You don’t keep a “paper trail written in blood”.

Only looked up Aviation Herald after you mentioned. Very informative, almost HN like, but even more dense and topical.

There is a now a comment on that article where the ground observer identifies himself and gives a few more details, so looks like you're right.

> 1) I was giving Simon a heads up to look for a report out of DEN - if it was anything, I thought it was just something like a (big) compressor stall. That was why so many caveats were there - I wasn't sure at the time that the aircraft had had a problem. I didn't realize it was going to be widely reported until my mother texted me a couple of hours later asking if any of the plane parts came down close to me

> 2) Something I omitted that I should have put in: After I got home I imagined how many thumb-widths at arm's length it would take to occlude it (from memory), and plugged that into similar triangles and the length of a 737 (didn't realize it was a 777) to get an estimated altitude and got 2-4 thousand meters. I thought the cloud deck was only 2000 feet AGL or so, so I didn't believe the numbers. I did change "a couple" to "a few" though. Turns out it was ~8000 feet AGL. I should have believed more in the math!

No offense towards the average bear, but I would probably have dictated a statement the same way.

I’m not an average bear though. I regularly read and refer to things learned from airlines and other high criticality career fields, and talk about them at conferences. My sister is an airline pilot and I might have been if I wasn’t medically disqualified.

I do participate in government emergency response work and that looks like the type of statement that would come from a trained observer who knows how to express directionality as unambiguously as possible.

>"AAAAAAAAAAAAA PLANE ON FIRE IN THE SKY, RUN!!!"

I grew up about 5 miles from an airport and for many years I had a recurring dream that I was looking out the window at an airliner that looked odd somehow or other, until I realized with growing horror it was going to crash in the back yard.

I never saw anything like it in real life, nor was it ever a concern for me whether I was in a flight path when deciding where to live, but evidently my subconscious had a "to do" list that included "be prepared for planes dropping out of the sky".

Strangely, I didn't have nightmares ever that I can remember about being on a plane in distress. Even though as I got older I got more anxious about flying.

The first Final Destination movie starts with a ground observer scene of about that distance of a plane crashing right after takeoff.

I don't know whether your age fits, but maybe you saw this and recalled it in your sleep every so often.

I have the same recurring dream a few times a year. I believe for me they started after 9/11.

Add that to the recurring dreams of losing all teeth, going to school only to realize there's a 20 page essay due, dinosaur attacks (inspired by Jurassic Park), and barely missing my school bus (that was just this morning).

Btw I'm 35 now.

Ugh, that "loosing all teeth" dream is very disturbing, quite annoying and even painful! Good thing is that I usually don't get it unless I had quite a few drinks the night before.

Pretty sure he was a pilot or a sea captain. I definitely would not refer to the right hand engine as "starboard engine".

You'd be surprised. Years back, I saw what looked to be a near midair collision, including a smoke trail from one of the involved aircraft, and watched for a while from the front right seat of the Jeep my boss was driving us to a job site in. Presence of mind isn't really an issue. You're more just trying to understand and follow what you're seeing.

Today, of course, I'd be watching through my 500mm lens and taking pictures all the while. This was long before I got back into photography, though, and long before you could get a 500mm tele that didn't cost as much as a car. Even so, it was interesting, not frightening - remember that the sky is a long way away, and so are most things that happen there, weather notwithstanding.

Never did find out what actually happened.

I recently listened to one of the radio correspondents (Herbert Morrison) [1] that was observing the hindenberg coming in - and it amazed me the things he thinks of while he's talking about it (how the people waiting for the passengers will be distressed) and the eloquent language used. ("Oh, the humanity!")

That said, he definitely also got distressed, but mostly remembered to describe.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ2qP4wd4LE

I expect the person interviewed is a pilot?

Or an engineer?

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