Comment by kchoudhu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kchoudhu | Hacker News Reader

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This rings true. I live in Doha and a very good family friend is an instructor in the local flag carrier's training program.

He was recently bemoaning the following situation:

1. There was a go-around on some flight or other (for good reason!)

2. Management interpreted this as a failure, and announced that every go-around will now have a full post-mortem with involved pilots requiring more sim time.

3. Pilots now think go-arounds are now off-limits. Oops!

This is a very, very common pattern in the Middle East. When the waterfall goes as planned, service is excellent. When exceptions happen, management freaks out and adds more layers of regulation to make sure the exception can't happen again, failing to recognize that exceptions are sometimes good. For benign stuff like customer service, you get frustrated customers. For important stuff like air safety... well, you end up with close calls or crashed airplanes.

Centralized decision making is a hell of drug.

My dad flew for 20 years in the Air Force. He more than once defied procedure that would have put him in jeopardy on a flight. He told me he was not going to die because of a bureaucratic rule written by someone whose ass was safely behind a desk.

One was when formation flying, pilots were to keep both eyes on the lead, and mimic his flying. This led to several crashes where the whole team died because the lead flew into the ground. He said he'd be damned if he was going to do that, and kept one eye on the lead and the other eye on the ground.

He spent some years as a flight instructor, who sits in the back seat. There were incidents where the student would panic and crash the airplane. That wasn't going to happen to my dad, either, and he kept a length of iron pipe at hand to beat the student into letting go of the controls.

(That Airbus that crashed into the Atlantic a few years ago was an example of the junior pilot panicking and holding the stick back till it crashed.)

> That wasn't going to happen to my dad, either, and he kept a length of iron pipe at hand to beat the student into letting go of the controls.

That's awesome haha. Hope your dad is well.

The Instructor's Stick is well regarded tradition all over the world.

One problem AF447 faced was that the closest thing to instructor who could whack the panicking pilot returned to cabin too late to fix it...

> Hope your dad is well

He is two months older than Betty White! Sadly, he passed at 93. I sorely miss him. But thanks for the kind thoughts, I appreciate them.

Yes about the airbus but the problem there is also that there is no feedback, so the second pilot can't feel what the other one is doing.

But in that case (I think you mean AF447) there was a lot more going on with confusing warning indications. They did however fly a perfectly functioning aircraft straight into the sea.

Yeah, that one. I was too lazy to look it up. Thanks!

It wasn't quite perfectly functioning. The pitot tubes had frozen, depriving the crew of reliable airspeed information.

That's true, I just meant that there was nothing technical stopping it from remaining airborne. But I should have said that.

you’re correct that the pitot tubes had malfunctioned, and this was a significant factor.

but the gp point has validity.

if the controls were physically linked, like they are in boeing aircraft, the pilots who were putting in opposing inputs would have realized what was going on pretty quickly.

On that note: I have had a triple go-around and even though everybody was super happy about making their connections on time I personally thought that that was an extremely unsafe landing with the port side wing coming uncomfortably close to the tarmac. Severe windshear, ours was the last flight to land before the airport was closed. The pilot stood at the door to say goodbye to the passengers and was visibly upset.

Any kind of pressure on pilots to make connections or to reduce the number of go arounds or even alternates should be pushed back against hard. It can only lead to more accidents.

This rings very true. My dad is a retired commercial pilot and has a whole evening's worth of rant about this, albeit mostly in the 1970s-80s, before pilot hours were regulated to quite the same extent they are now (and with less automation). He said that his absolute worst was a "double washington" (i.e. London to Washington twice in "a day"), and that on the return leg either him or a co-pilot would really be operating at their physiological limits, at the stressful approach to Heathrow. Turnaround time and load factors are basically the thing that airlines compete on, with the net result that they were strongly encouraged to "man up" and "power on through".

After falling asleep for 10 minutes over the mid-atlantic at some point before I was born, apparently all the pilots in the airline agreed to sleep in shifts for safety reasons, and never told management about it...

He also has a story about a frozen Canada goose coming through the windscreen at FL300 above a dark cloud, but that's a story for another day...

Wow that Canada goose thing must have been some story. With the decompression and -60C air coming in at 700 knots. Wow

The interesting thing about that flight is that I don't think the pilot knew how close to crashing we came whereas I had a 'front row seat' to what would have been a wingtip ground strike if we had been just a tiny little bit lower. I've flown 100's of times per year for a decade and I've never had a landing that bad. This was a short hop from Berlin to Amsterdam on Lufthansa.

I'd love to hear your dad's stories, there isn't a pilot that I know that doesn't have an evening's worth of material, so if you have the time to write that one up that would be great.

Out of curiosity what job did you have that required you to fly 100s of times a year for a decade (assuming you're not in the aviation industry).

Edit; never mind, I looked at your profile.

Ooh, it’s like internally reporting security vulnerabilities!

The parallels are legion (unfortunately).

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