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Comment by BoxFour | Hacker News Reader

The author explicitly points out the nonappearance of the captains rant within the NTSB report.

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.

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> 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.

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

> The NTSB would have called it out if that were the case.

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.)

> absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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.

But that’s a silly way to look at things, because you could say it about anything - it tells you nothing.

“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”

The point we're responding to is this:

> 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.

It’s not because we have experts at the NTSB to make a call as to relevance.

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.

Real life is rarely about evidence or not evidence, which is a categorical decision (in contrast to evidence in court, which can be circumstantial).

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.

Can you conclude that the mental state was irrelevant? You can't.

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.

> The NTSB would have called it out if that were the case.

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.

> so maybe that’s not how they are structured.

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*

> 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.

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.

Yes, it seems unlikely that this was the only time the captain disregarded the sterile cockpit rule. (But I guess we'll never know)

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

There have been some very smart racists in the past. Depending on your definition of racism, it could even include Nobel prize winners from the last century.

Yes, still, I think the average intelligence is lower (among people with racist ideas), although there are exceptions

> 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.

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.

> “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?”

My guess is that the NTSB wants to focus on causes that they can issue guidance for, rather than assign blame. Sure, the captain's state of mind most likely contributed to the incident, but it also revealed a couple of issues that warranted new guidance, which is a big part of what the reports are for.

No, this is absolutely incorrect. The NTSB focuses on the cause, regardless of whether or not guidance can be issued based on 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.

Ah okay, that sounds a lot more reasonable.

The NTSB should have issued guidance that if the pilot or copilot is in a distraught emotional state, takeoff should not happen. And it is the responsibility of the other to abort takeoff.

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".

> 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.

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 question of whether the CVR recording demonstrates good communication is something of a red herring. As the article and NTSB report make clear, the crew deviated significantly from the correct procedure, which should have led to the unambiguous identification of the working engine. While the crew were not arguing, cockpit discipline had still broken down, with the result that the pilots talked themselves into believing that they had a double engine failure.

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.

Would the 30min discussion during cargo loading count against the sterile cockpit rule? Obviously the ground is less than 10,000 ft but surely there's a point in time that defines the "start" of the flight when the rule goes into effect.

Most of the pre-flight work on a plane on the ground is safety critical, with rules around them written in the blood of somebody who wasn't paying enough attention and missed them.

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.

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