The linked article is not bad but reads a bit too much like a Dan Brown novelization for me taste… “ The mustachioed Captain Pearson pulled out the trusty Boeing handbook, his fingers dashing through the pages…”
When this captain handed the plane over to the captain of the incident flight, there was a misunderstanding in the conversation that led to the incoming captain believing the prior captain had been flying with blank fuel gauges and only manual fuel checks. In an unfortunate coincidence, the second technician who was checking the plane at this time disabled both channels to try and troubleshoot the issue again, but failed to return the system to the “one channel” functioning state (apparently because he was interrupted by a request to help with the manual fuel check, ironically).
The second technician’s mistake would have been noticed by the pilots, except that due to the misunderstanding, they were expecting to see blank gauges. Those were the initial conditions that allowed the “pounds, not kilograms” mistake to threaten the flight.
With flight 143, the sheer brilliance of the flying after the fuel ran out - plus the too-neat story of “it was all caused by metric / imperial conversion” can easily distract from the real lynchpin of the whole incident, which was as you say why the plane was flown with non-functional fuel gauges when that was contrary to the Minimum Equipment List for the aircraft. Taking off with blank fuel gauges was the core safety rule that was violated: the mistake with the unit conversions was necessary to make that violation dangerous but it wasn’t really the core of the accident.
IIRC, a cascade of human errors is also what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
It's an incredible enough event that it's worth reading both!
> ...when flight attendants opened the rear emergency exits, they found that the tail was so high in the air that the slides didn’t touch the ground. Sliding down them was less like schoolyard fun and more like jumping off the second or third floor of a building
But then it proceeds showing a photo of deployed rear exit slides, and judging by human standing there they almost touched the ground, the difference is like half that human at most. Now, while I agree that jumping from 1 meter may be too much for some people, comparing it with 3rd floor jump is totally out of place. What am I missing here?