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Comment by llambda | Hacker News Reader

> Unlike car accidents, which are often blamed on driver (and thus human) error, airplane crashes are considered engineering failures...

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something about the way these accidents are investigated and understood, but directly after this the author goes on to cite Air France 447, which many of us have by now read about in Popular Science, among other sources I'm sure, wherein it's made clear that that particular flight fell into the ocean for no other reason than a persistence fault on the part of the copilot who had control of the plane. So how does that qualify as an engineering error and not simply human error? Could the author mean by "engineering" such an abstraction as the engineering of flight training?

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I think it means that any crash, even if caused by the pilots fault, is seen as a fixable technical problem, either in automation, equipment, reliability, or pilot training.

We don't send all car drivers back to get their license if somebody crashes his car. We do try to "fix" the pilots if something like this happens.

Maybe a better term is "systems failure", where the pilot is part of the system.

The cockpit has two switches, right next to each other, on the control panel. They're exactly the same size, shape, and color. They feel the same in your hand.

The only difference between these two switches are the labels. One says "Recover from Stall", the other "Self-Destruct".

After the explosion, is it "pilot error" that you pressed the wrong switch? Or is an engineering failure that those buttons were so indistinguishable to begin with?

He missed a word like "frequently" after "airplane crashes are", and that might confuse a few people (as it confused you). His point is - much like you said yourself - that most airplane crashes are often related to engineering failures (actual mechanical/system failures), but that in this particular case, it was human error.

He's still wrong: human error is a factor in the overwhelming majority of aviation mishaps (I don't have stats handy, but it's something in the neighborhood of 85% IIRC).

This must be understood in the context that while it is almost always a factor, it is rarely the only factor. Aviation mishaps typically occur when three or more factors combine. For example, if you're just low on gas, or just in bad weather, or just a little bit tired, you probably won't have a mishap, but put all three together and things can rapidly get out of hand. In the case of AF 447, they were in bad weather (which caused a malfunction in the FCS), they had CRM problems (Captain was not in the cockpit, and the two pilots who were in the cockpit did not coordinate well), there were serious flaws in the HMI design (the most egregious example, in my mind, being the averaging of the stick inputs), and the crew was not sufficiently trained on how to respond to FCS failures.

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