Dark Waters of Self-Delusion: The crash of Transair flight 810
admiralcloudberg.medium.com
admiralcloudberg.medium.com
There are some great lessons to learn from this (better flight control handovers during emergency, double checking which engine failed, applying thrust to both engines when nothing else works). The violation of the sterile cockpit rule and the asshole nature of the captain were not factors here as determined by the NTSB.
The first officer gave him bad info and he accepted it. That is not a failure mode caused by being obstinate nor a “team player”.
The author points out that NTSB report does allude to the captain's many instances of dubious judgment during the emergency.
The author also highlights the protracted diatribe spanning thirty minutes, transpiring even during the hallowed period of the "sterile cockpit," implying a discernible lack of concentration on the imminent mission.
The captain's unclear headspace became evident by his protracted tirade. He was likely mentally unfit for the task of captaining that day, and the rant was evidence of it.
The guidance itself will be focused on relevance, but the root cause is never tainted that way. If the NTSB thought the rant had absolutely anything to do with this, they would have mentioned it.
This is organizationally hard to do within an airline. But it is easy to do if regulators back it up, and the questionable state is backed up by dialog during the "sterile cockpit".
You jumped to the same conclusion the author did, which was that the rant was evidence of anything. Some people rant all of the time and sometimes it’s about sexist, racist, whatever things. It does not imply they are mentally unfit for captaining.
The NTSB would have called it out if that were the case. They did not. For an example of where they would, look at this flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_212
Should have called it out if they had enough evidence to support it, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
(Mine is not a defense of the article.)
Exactly. It's a significant cognitive bias / logical fallacy that's very easy to fall for leading to wrong conclusions.
The not-inclusion of factor A for lack of evidence is not evidence of A not being a factor.
“I had bad diarrhea before getting into a car accident. There is no evidence it contributed, but that’s not proof it wasn’t a factor”
> All of the commentary on the violation of the sterile cockpit rule and argument before departure are irrelevant to the actual cause
Which is just as false a statement as it is to say "The violation of the sterile cockpit rule and argument before departure were a significant cause". The fact is, we don't know if it was, but it's not wrong to say that it might be.
You’re right it could be relevant, but they just didn’t have any data to support that.
But you could also argue the copilot’s career as a lawyer could be relevant plus a million other factors, we just don’t know.
It adds nothing to the discussion because it’s not actionable.
Some more context in addition to the sibling comment: The classical example is this. You want to test the effectiveness of two drugs A and B in some sort of clinical trial. You gather a lot of data and learn that drug A has an average effectiveness of 4.0, while drug B has 4.9 (more is better). You apply a statistical test and it tells you B is not significantly different from A.
Can you conclude that B is not better than A? You can't. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There could be any number of reasons why we don't have significant evidence, e.g. because the experiment was done with a sample too small. B might be better than A, but there is no evidence it is.
The NTSB gathers a lot of data regarding the crash. The board looks at all the factors and deliberates whether they contributed to the crash. It determines that there is no significant evidence that the mental state of the pilot was relevant.
Can you conclude that the mental state was irrelevant? You can't. It's likely the pilot experienced stress but it is impossible to determine whether this stress was significant. It might well be, but there is no evidence it was.
Parent seems to think it was not a factor. But by relying on a flawed argument we will not find out why he actually thinks that way, ultimately leading to an unproductive discussion.
No, but you can’t claim it was relevant either. So either scenario is likely, so we rely on the experts at NTSB to make a call.
Saying “we cant prove its not relevant” is not actionable information, so it’s not really worth raising it.
If there’s protracted conversation unrelated to the safe operation of flight, apparently agitated conversation, being conducted during a critical phase of flight, it seems odd that the official report would not mention what led the NTSB to exclude psychological factors and/or cockpit distractions as a contributing factor. But I don’t read these reports frequently; so maybe that’s not how they are structured. I imagined that they were structured like scientific papers where the conclusions typically anticipate reviewers’ critiques and dealt with them in advance. Then again, there’s no intent of peer review here.
The article touches on this, emphasis mine:
> In the end, the NTSB declined to mention these conversations in its final report, *which is normal — most of the time, the agency doesn’t wade into pilots’ personal disputes*
That would be even worse: If the captain consistently disregards their training by engaging in unnecessary conversations during designated sterile cockpit periods, it indicates a consistent lack of suitability for the position of captaining an airplane.
GP:
> > It does not imply they are mentally unfit for captaining
It does, if they do it during the sterile cockpit periods.
You could also argue that sexist and racist ideas indicate that that person is a bit dumb. Which isn't what you'd want to see in a pilot
Given the whole idea behind the sterile cockpit rule, I'd say this is clearly wrong. It's true that ranting about mysogynist murder fantasies is probably no worse from a safety perspective (albeit wildly more offensive) than other topics, but ranting about anything is just a no-go in the air. When you're flying the plane you're supposed to be talking about flying the plane, and nothing else.
It really seems like you and other posters here want this blog post to be some kind of woke tirade you need to rebutt. But that's not how most of us are reading it. They mysogyny is the evidence, not the crime. Really the article is pretty dry.
Reading through the article, that's not the feel I get. As presented by the article, the captain state of mind did had an effect, he was not at 100% of its mental capacities.
But reading through the CVR transcript, the communication between the first officer and captain was good, and the crew did fly the plane from take-off up until the end which implies that the breach of the "sterile cockpit" rule before take-off did not had any major effect. They were fully focused on the task of flying immediately before and during the emergency.
They simply both made mistakes/bad judgement calls.
In fairness, the captain did make more mistakes, and some of these mistakes maybe may have been avoided if he was in a different state of mind. But at the same time he was placed in a situation where these mistakes could occur and become catastrophic (very old and unreliable plane lacking maintenance and ways to easily troubleshoot an engine failure).
In my opinion, he, or any other pilot could have made the same mistakes even in a right state of mind. It's also an unreasonable assumption that pilots will always operate at 100% of their capacity.
The deviations started with the captain struggling with an overloaded radio channel, which should have been cut short by squawking 7700. Th article notes that the controller was a woman. Was that an issue in what followed? It’s a possibly-relevant factor that we will never get a certain answer to.
No one is assuming that pilots will always operate at 100% capacity, which is one of the reasons for having procedures intended to catch common errors.
Paying attention to things like weight checks, fuel checks, and systems bringup should take priority over gossip.
Imagine if your prod system was on fire, and while waiting for a diagnostic query to run, you talk your coworkers ear off about how you really dislike working with another coworker. It's just not the time to do that. Every single flight requires your attention, and letting things become routine is called "normalization of deviance" and is step one to an event that kills people.
The NTSB is great. They're not the final word on anything in particular.
It’s disingenuous to do a publication the final report and cause of a crash and blend in your own views without big disclaimers that they aren’t supported.
It’s no different than the author focusing on the ethnicity or religion of the pilots or even the phases of the moon and planets. There is what the NTSB said, and what the author pulled out of his ass. They are unfortunately blended together and pretty severely conflict in this case.
This article does not, yet presents speculation as fact, without critical context that the NTSB certainly considered.
Facts are important because you can learn from them, speculation about human behavior is sensationalist bullshit because you can't prove it and can't reliably prevent human error in the first place.
For example: only a handful of 372's were ever ETOPS certified and I'm pretty sure this plane was not one of them. Should airframes with lower reliability like that even be allowed to operate in areas like Hawaii in the first place? Clearly these pilots weren't prepared to handle the situation, what needs to happen (and what the NTSB aims to do) is to avoid putting any other pilots in the same situation, from a holistic perspective
As I understand it from the article, he had a difference of opinion on how to interpret certain procedures, not a "disregard" of them.
The captain rather demonstrated proper CRM by delegating aviating to the co-pilot while he communicated with tower control. He also trusted the judgment of the fist officer as to which engine was out, although the information he was given was wrong.
Also, see this quote:
> “This is the way we work when I am with her, you know, you have to yell at her to force her to do things.”
This is ignoring the paid-in-blood lessons of the worst aviation accident in history (Tenerife) that could have been avoided if the captain listened to his crew. Crewmembers should always feel free to speak up in safetry critical situations. You don't "force them to do things".
I don't think this contributed to this particular incident because both pilots agreed on the wrong engine but it is very valid criticism IMO.
And would have made diddly-squat difference in a case where wrong engine is shut down.
Or would you also like there to be more than 2 engines just in case a pilot shuts down the wrong engine in the case of a single engine failure?
ETOPS absolutely _could_ have made the difference here. Either by avoiding the engine failure in the first place my way of more strict maintenance requirements, or potentially by setting the expectation that the aircraft can operate with a single engine and causing the pilots to rethink which engine was underperforming.
But just like the original article, speculation like that is not practical for an NTSB report
They would need ETOPS if their closest alternate would be mainland.
> causing pilots to rethink
Really? Really?
The point of ETOPS is to ensure that pilots can continue to operate the plane on a single engine, and that the likelihood of dual engine failure is vanishingly small. It explicitly requires manageable pilot workload (which was cited by the NTSB as a failure/contributor to this crash), and is implemented in part through more rigorous maintenance and inspection.
You're right that ETOPS would not be required for a flight like this but aside from the notable flight envelope difference (since ETOPS focuses on engine failure while cruising far from airports) the considerations for ETOPS are very similar to considerations that would go into prevention this crash in the future.
The sexism doesn't have anything to do with the crash, nor did I claim that it does. So why did I even bring it up? This is probably news to most of you, but I'm a woman, and let me tell you, when we hear a man say something like that, we pay attention. I was shocked when I read his statements in the CVR, and felt it would be eye-opening for some people to hear them. Nor is it character assassination to point out that the things he said are wrong and contribute to a hostile working environment for women.
What could—not DID, but COULD—have actually contributed to the crash was the stress that the captain was under as a result of the incident. The hypothesis that he was stressed before the flight is supported by the length of his discussion of this one stressful topic, extending into periods where off-topic conversation was banned. Note that I specifically characterize this as a hypothesis supported by evidence; I didn't portray it as established fact, and I specifically pointed out that I was going beyond the NTSB report. However, the NTSB report doesn't say anything one way or the other about whether this was a potential cause of the captain's stress (stress which the report did identify as a contributing factor). I'm not contradicting anything in the report, but rather highlighting a connection which really stood out to me, from my particular perspective. So to those who say "if it was a problem, the NTSB would have mentioned it," is it not equally true to say "if it wasn't a problem, the NTSB would have refuted it?" To me, silence on the topic leaves the door open to independent analysis. If the NTSB didn't want people to make this connection, they should have addressed it.
Lastly, I want to mention that I actually contacted the relevant NTSB investigators for comment before publishing this, but they declined interviews.
It's interesting in another way too: I think the crazy thing he said, suggests that he is a bit dumb. (Both for having such thoughts, and for sharing them with others, whilst being recorded.) Which is of relevance, I think. And might indicate that there was a recruitment problem as well. (The airline company hires dumb and sexist pilots?)
That does seem to be the primary purpose of your article.
But checklists, they stay the same, don't change, under stress. So, follow the checklists. But they didn't.
(Of relevance for software too, I think: DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering)
The sexist things are not just interesting, but of some relevance to the crash, for other reasons I think -- see my reply to the sibling to your comment if you want.
[1] https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2021/01/21...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kegworth_air_disaster
[3] https://aerossurance.com/safety-management/bua-bac11-g-asjj-...
1) was a USAF aircraft, a 2-engine Bombardier aircraft. Despite the name, this is a small civilian jetliner. "Loud bang" and engine failure in cruise. "Because the warning signal did not immediately light up for the catastrophically damaged left engine — it took several seconds for its RPMs to drop below the point that would have triggered the signal — the crew didn’t immediately know which engine had blown. The pilots thought the right engine had experienced the emergency, leading them to shut it down instead of the left one. The shutdown meant the plane now had no engines operating, and happened relatively quickly, about 24 seconds after the fan blade broke." A restart of the wrong engine was attempted while the good engine was kept shut down.
2) is a well known disaster. "The aircraft was on a scheduled flight from London Heathrow Airport to Belfast International Airport when a fan blade broke in the left engine, disrupting the air conditioning and filling the cabin with smoke. The pilots believed this indicated a fault in the right engine, since earlier models of the 737 ventilated the cabin from the right, and they were unaware that the 737-400 used a different system. The pilots mistakenly shut down the functioning engine. They selected full thrust from the malfunctioning one and this increased its fuel supply, causing it to catch fire. Of the 126 people aboard, 47 died and 74 sustained serious injuries."
3) is from 1969, and is something of a period piece. This plane had three pilots; two in seats with controls, and a third one as "pilot in command" supervising but with no access to the controls. His comment, afterward, was “It is perhaps not quite correct to be ultimately responsible for the safe handling of an aircraft in an emergency unless occupying a seat from where this can be done. I feel, somehow, that had I been occupying either of the pilot’s seats I might have reacted differently; on the other hand, it is possible that had I not been present the two pilots might also have reacted differently.” That strange setup may have been a holdover from the British early WWII "aircraft commander" concept. This was borrowed from naval practice, where the officer of the deck tells the junior people who are actually driving the ship what to do. It turned out to be a terrible idea in the air, where things happened faster. But somehow British United Airways was doing it in 1969. Nobody questioned the pilot in command deciding, wrongly, which engine had failed.
There was a C-5 crash at Dover after an engine failure, but it wasn't caused by shutting down the wrong engine.[1]
[1] https://theaviationgeekclub.com/an-in-depth-analysis-of-infa...
In this confusion, induced by the rushed approach, they did not catch that the copilot had brought up the throttle for the dead engine, and left the throttle for the good inboard engine at idle power. This made them a two-engine heavyweight aircraft without enough power to save themselves.
And the TransAsia Airways Flight 235 in 2015 with a very similar story to the one in the article.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransAsia_Airways_Flight_235
Are devops/SRE/etc people using voice comms these days during high impact incidents or is text (irc/slack/etc) still preferred?
I guess I assumed you were deploying overly complicated glorified CRUD apps like (most of) the rest of us.
So what do you use for comms during high impact incidents? Are you all in the same room?
And as it happens... I do CRUD web apps too, offically about 20% of my time. Including that one. And for those we use text.
"Socialize with your colleagues" is actually an item on one of our checklists!
I do think the risk tolerance of individuals on the project does tend to gradually increase with experience, but we have fairly high turnover. It's common for MSL roles to have a year or more of training before certification during which you spend a lot of time focusing on what can go wrong, so new people definitely trend cautious.
That would be my assumption.
For earth operations everyone would be focused and ready (especially if that involves people). With Mars there’s several minutes of comm lag, by the time you get an emergency signal it’s resolved one way or the other.
It was also understood that non technical managers and etc could not wander over to the tech support floor.
It was absolutely critical in order to maintain good technical communication and etc. No drama, just matter of fact check lists and technical discussions.
A big bank could have all their ATMs down (sorry I did that once) and the discussion was all technical and cool and calm.
Our technical staff customers loved it too as their management were on the other call too ;)
An office-example might be if you had the super-serious conference room that is exclusively used for super-serious things. The physical context would affect how likely people are to follow the desired norms.
> "In fact, with both engines at idle, the asymmetric thrust had disappeared, and it was trivial to keep the plane straight and level."
> "First Officer Ryan even seemingly forgot that the left engine was at idle power because he put it there himself not even two minutes earlier."
And here we have the primary cause of all the confusion. It was not trivial to keep the plane at level, if engines had no power. The "sexism", the "given their earlier conversation, he surely knew where arguing with Okai would get him (which was nowhere)" aren't the cause here.
So, I think the sexism is important to the explanatory narrative because it demonstrates the scale of the power imbalance between the captain and the first officer - the captain sat there and blabbed for 32 minutes including something so objectionable as musing about how if annoying women get murdered, it's their fault. Quoth the article:
> “These are the kind of women you don’t wanna get married to,” he said. “You know, some men, they lose their temper and the next thing you know, the wife is dead, you know… they start punching them and kicking them, and they lost their minds, you know… they kill the woman… it’s the woman who can drive you to do crazy stuff, you know?”
But the first officer was not empowered to object to that - not empowered to object for sexism and murder, not for tabs vs spaces, not for anything. There was, therefore, possibly nothing the captain could have said in that 32 minutes that the first officer would have objected to.
Just in case it's news to anyone: they absolutely do. It's very eye opening when you witness such things. Women can be and often are just as hateful as men.
Hate is a normal human emotion.
Exactly. Patriarchy isn't just a system where all men have power over all women. It's also about hierarchies of men. A good example is the FLDS [1], which Jon Krakauer wrote about in Under the Banner of Heaven. [2] There, the highest-status men are supported by other men who are rewarded with dominance over other lower-down people. That produces a bunch of surplus young men who are eventually driven off.
This sort of continually enforced dominance hierarchy, whatever you think of it morally, is poisonous to the kind of mindset and relationships you need to keep up our (extraordinarily good) airline safety record.
And let me also add a plug for Dekker's "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'", which is on the surface about understanding airplane crashes, but does a great job of conveying why important technological systems require a very different way of thinking about things to succeed. One of my top books of all time, especially for anybody in tech who cares about uptime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_ Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Banner_of_Heaven
And, it is relevant context, given the kerffufle about whether to follow the checklist and how flustered Okai became.
No it’s not. The call to not follow the checklist came from the first officer (focusing on flying the plane was higher priority). The captain didn’t challenge him on it because he agreed with the call. There was no “kerffufle” or even disagreement.
I thought the discussion with Moore was relevant because that argument had been about Okai not doing procedures by the book, and because Okai has been previously reprimanded for failing to follow an engine shutdown checklist.
You might think twice about your interpretation of this. It is mainstream psychology to recognize the effects that one human can have on another. Brainwashing happens. Induced mental trauma exists. Look at Charles Manson and the influence he had, look at Patty Hearst. Humans can have drastic influence over their victims (intentionally or unintentionally) and there should be no shame in the ensuing mental illness that results, and neither gender no perceived gender roles should diminish our sympathy for such victims.
To say carte blanche that no woman can mentally traumatize a man to the point that he should be considered a victim of brainwashing is a bit naive and likely sexist.
> To say carte blanche that no woman can mentally traumatize a man to the point that he should be considered a victim of brainwashing is a bit naive and likely sexist.
Who would say that and why???
These are obviously horrible things to say, but people "vent" all the time to their friends saying things they don't mean. I've head women who recently got broken up with say all men should die, people say they wish their manager got hit by a bus, etc.
"Excusing murder" seems like the worst-faith interpretation here, and anyone who vents their angry thoughts being "publicly exposed" seems like it would do a lot more harm than good.
As per other comments in this thread, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36591776
Not sure why the scare quotes. What he said was definitely sexist and doesn't need defending; and no one's claimed his sexism was the cause of the accident, so that argument doesn't need refuting either.
https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot/videos
His accident breakdowns are fantastic, as are those by Juan Brown:
I don’t think anybody thinks that they are horrible human beings. The article is certainly not implying that in any way about the copilot. The captain clearly has failings, as described by the article, but it is not implied in any way that he is a terrible human being.
> some major scapegoating of flight crew
I disagree. They had a perfectly flyable airplane and crashed it almost killing themselves. That is not good airmanship.
Yes, all of those other things were also factors. I totaly understand that. The point of hearing stories like this is to understand what went wrong and how we can learn from them to not commit the same mistakes. Zero scapegoating.
Most disasters result from multiple things going wrong together, hence the importance of addressing them individually.
The problem is when corporate culture, and be it because of understaffing or penalizing people for calling out, disincentivizes people from following that basic principle.
A side note: The fact that such absurd crew confusion is still possible in 2021 doesn't exactly warm me up to the thought of twin-jets crossing over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Boeing has successfully lobbied for an exception to having to install EICAS systems specifically to avoid having to re-train and re-certify pilots.
And this was after they murdered hundreds of people in order to achieve the same goal with the 737MAX.
The author mentions this in another article about the infamous British Midland flight: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lefts-rights-and-wrongs-...
> And yet, despite this fact, the Boeing 737 still does not come with an EICAS. 737s are rolling off the assembly line at this very moment without the system. This is because adding an EICAS would disrupt the continuity between the various 737 models, forcing pilots to receive separate type ratings for 737s with EICAS and those without. This feature of the 737 series is so fundamental that when a rule requiring EICAS on new models certified in the US came into effect at the end of 2022, Boeing and 737 operators lobbied Congress to grant an exemption, allowing the FAA to finish certifying the new 737 MAX 10 and MAX 7 without an EICAS. The pressure was immense: after all, major airlines didn’t want to buy the MAX 10 and MAX 7 if their pilots would have to acquire a new type rating to fly them, and if the airlines weren’t going to buy the models, then Boeing wasn’t going to build them, resulting in job losses and a shortage of narrow body airliners on the market. As a result, in the immediate future, 737s will continue to fly around the world without the benefit of EICAS, even though nearly every other modern airliner now has the system. There were of course compelling reasons behind the exemption, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a trade-off.
Of course those arguments are BS anyway, the airlines are not going to stop buying airliners just because of some type rating requirements. It's not as if they have any choice. Boeing is just worried they'll buy Airbus instead.
The closest you can get is a couple dozens on a bus, and we regularly have issues with tired/stressed drivers there and catastrophic incidents - but unlike airspace, next to zero enforcement of protection rules :/
But at the same time, the UI design of the EPR readouts just sucks. It's hard to say whether the engine is idling or at the full power with a simple glance. And the fix would have been easy, just add a limiter at the 12 o'clock position and rescale the gauge accordingly.
Also, the gauges tell the story, the captain should have verified what the 1st officer told him, especially with an engine failure. Thankfully, both survived.
I'll tap this box open. The author goes out of their way to paint a bad picture of the pilot by switching "crazy" to "think's she's annoying". He absolutely should not rant about this on the company plane, however if a murderer has any history of mental illness, yes, a woman can literally drive you crazy.
The point about sexism was unnecessary and detracting to the story. It's yet another sad sign of how political propaganda infects absolutely everything. I long the days where you could simply enjoy a story without having to endure references to any kind of cultural war (sex wars, identity politics, etc), or narcissistic virtue signaling from an author.
Yes, sexism bad. Yes, woman were unfairly treated at some points in history. Yes, people should have sex to whatever consenting adult entity they prefer. But do we really need to plaster every single wall in life with those messages? To me it's just tiring. I need places where the relentless totalitarian narrative "our tribe good, that tribe bad" stops and I can simply enjoy life and smell some flowers.
I can't help but think the author craved a tap on the back, and wanted to send a message saying: "please like me because I'm one of your gang. I despise sexism and this story is factual evidence that the rival gang (sexists) are incompetent assholes".
But using the HN ethos, I should assume a positive intention from the author. Such a reading would be: "women are good intuitive thinkers, and the woman who walked out that flight knew the pilot was not competent". But if that's the intention, there's no logic or arguments to support it in the story.
disagree. it goes to show what was on the Captain's mind when he should have been focusing on preparing for flight, and getting his head in the game.
he was obviously rubbed raw by the interaction, and blamed it on sexist things rather than considering that maybe he had a hand in the outcome of the conversation with the woman in question.
this lack of ownership of one's own actions as demonstrated by the captain was apparent throughout the entire article and was a factor in the crash, as described.
If we consider that the captain spoke for 32 minutes, I don't think a half dozen quotes are necessarily representative of the 32 minutes.
It's possible he spent 30 minutes talking about her poor technical performance and poor teamwork with other pilots, and 2 minutes making sexist remarks. But sexist remarks are much more sensational, plays to certain prejudices, and are more likely to drive clicks than criticism (perhaps warranted) of someone's professional behavior.
please stop seeing things like this as virtue signaling. it's myopic, and negatively colors your view of what is going on.
mentioning the sexism is a very effective way to communicate what was going on in that pilot's mind to people who have a good handle on why sexism is a problem and where it is commonly observed. that's all it is.
there's no "I'm better than you because I say sexism is bad" in this article.
My point, which I will repeat again, is that you should not judge "where his head was at the time" based on a handful of quotes cherry picked from 32 minutes.
> please stop seeing things like this as virtue signaling
Please stop seeing things as reinforcing whatever prejudices you walked into this with.
The fact that the pilot ranted about his female co-worker for 30 minutes, after engine start, in violation of cockpit hygiene rules, is how we know that the pilot's sexism is relevant to this plane crash.
That's not what I read. He said a woman can drive the man crazy. The use of the word "crazy" show that the captain understood that such an action would be madness. He simply highlighted how interactions with their wives could be so infuriating to some men that they do crazy things.
"These are the kind of women you don’t wanna get married to. You know, some men, they lose their temper and the next thing you know, the wife is dead... it’s the woman who can drive you to do crazy stuff, you know?"
The idea that this is some kind of passive, context-free observation that some men kill their wives after getting frustrated with them is absurd.
How do you go from the statement above to: when a man kills his wife, it's the wife's fault? He is simply saying the wife's behavior is a factor, nothing more.
You're reading an article about a plane crash.
FWIW I think Admiral Cloudberg's not a guy. Fair chance they've experienced sexism themselves.
I'm not sure why US avaiation has not changed that, but they have a lingo and seem to stick with it.
The captain should have used the phrase ‘pan-pan’, which indicates an urgent situation but no immediate danger to life or aircraft.
Also squawk 7700 as said in the article, which highlights the aircraft on modern radar systems.
Partly because the pilot cannot be certain that a single engine failure hasn't caused secondary damage, or that it's a not symptom of another deeper problem (i.e. running out of fuel). And in part because the FAA doesn't want pilots to hesitate calling MAYDAY and potentially making the situation worse by staying in the air longer then they absolutely have to.
There seems to be a very wide range of abilities there. Some people seem to always know the difference, but for some of us we're giving directions by pointing, because a turn is coming up and we can't figure it out in time which is which.
I wonder if the people involved had trouble with direction and mirroring in general?
It worked in Podracer!
Modern predictive techniques could easily detect engine failure (ie. "Here is the history of the last 10 seconds of the throttle position, and here is the current RPM, is the engine failed?"). But aircraft designs don't like to use such techniques - they prefer simple thresholds. And with simple thresholds, a bunch of engine failures can get missed, especially partial failures.
E.g.,
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/system-of-denial-the-cra...
> Following the crash and the publication of the NTSB’s damning final report, substantive changes were finally made to prevent similar accidents from happening again in the future. The FAA launched an industry-wide campaign to root out the myth of “ice bridging,” and it became standard practice to activate the deicing boots immediately upon entering icing conditions. The FAA mandated that all EMB-120s and several other aircraft types be fitted with automatic ice detection systems; Comair increased its minimum speed in icing conditions to 170 knots; and the FAA required all manufacturers to provide clear minimum maneuvering speed information for flight in icing conditions. The FAA also established standardized communication channels between FAA experts and POIs stationed at airlines; created a new database to more carefully track airworthiness matters involving foreign manufacturers; and most importantly, launched major research initiatives designed to ensure that the requirements of FAR Part 25 Appendix C were realistic and covered all ice shapes that were likely to form in flight, including thin layers of sandpaper-type ice. These resulted in a series of revisions to FAR part 25 to reflect state-of-the-art knowledge of aircraft icing, which continued all the way through 2016, including via the addition of further testing criteria not originally identified by the NTSB. As a result, it is now known exactly how every aircraft currently in service will react to all the types of in-flight icing which are likely to occur, and limitations exist to ensure that controllability is not compromised.
Where's the NTSB recommendation on creating an official policy on HOW to diagnose an engine? The abnormal checklists only tell you to "shut down the broken engine" but leave it up to you to ad-hoc a way to diagnose the problem in an emergency, which is the wrong time to be inventing something non-trivial. Boeing/Airbus/GE/Rolls royce, whoever should have an official document describing a procedure to test an engine for failure that pilots are expected to refer to unless it would be unsafe
I am not a commercial pilot, just GA pilot for 10 years. I know many cases of incompetence in GA, but never in commercial aviation, this is not how trained pilots should fly a 737 and I have no idea how they got the permission to do it.
Based on this article the keyword is "is depicted". It starts with an ad hominem attack on the captain. And I didn't even see many mentions or quotes from the actual accident report.
I did stop half way because it's simply too long for how much I care about the subject. I won't research it further either so I'll just end up with the pushing an agenda impression.
> I know many cases of incompetence in GA, but never in commercial aviation
You mean you have never heard of commercial aviation pilots making mistakes? This can't be right.
The pilots of Air France 447 crashed a perfectly flyable plane into the ocean because they failed to apply one of the most basic principles of flight: raising the nose can cause a stall as the aircraft loses speed, whereas bringing down the nose allows you to pick up speed and pull out of a stall. One pilot kept pulling back on the yoke for several minutes until they crashed.
Would you say they just made mistakes, or were just plain incompetent?