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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

In movies you see military folks with a very dry sense of humor. Doubly so for Airforce/Navy pilots, and then test pilots just bury the needle.

Having worked with a few different veterans over the years (army, Intelligence, and submarine) I don't have anything in my small but diverse sample size that disagrees with that mythos.

Golden Era NASA was mostly pilots and quite a few of them test pilots. "Houston, we have a problem" is iconic but as far as I can tell, not exceptional.

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> Houston, we have a problem

A lot of people comment on this, but it succinctly relays the severity, in that the the pilot is alive, and the radio works.

I read Chuck Yeager's autobiography when I was a kid. I remember from that that when a fellow test pilot fatally crashed, they'd say he "bought the farm".

I do wonder if the words should be further away from each other phonetically though - start … unstart seem close enough to be confused if the radio is noisy

Nobody is going to be talking about an unstart over the radio in an emergency situation. It took 2-3 seconds between the unstart and the aircraft disintegrating.

I get that but it’s not my point. I’m wondering in general about word choice to minimize collisions

I suspect the pilots and ground crew save their energy to fight about the things they are likely to say over a radio and let the engineers do whatever they want with the rest.

Unstart is a lot less evocative than “flameout” as used in the Top Gun movie. Flameout sounds like the plane is on fire. Especially if garbled.

Meanwhile, if your righter pilot sounds like he said engine start while flying? That’s only gonna happen if the engine already shut down. So that’s only ambiguous until the pilot keeps talking, in which case you know he was able to restart the engine before losing consciousness, versus the end of that conversation.

“The Right Stuff” book evokes this atmosphere nicely.

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