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Comment by eschneider | Hacker News Reader

If you want to become a better developer through aviation, I can't recommend anything more highly than reading through NTSB accident reports. Learn from others the many, many ways small problems and misjudgements become accidents. It'll change the way you build things.

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I'm really glad I stumbled on your comment. I train people in conflict resolution and emotional leadership and I've been looking for places to learn more about conflicts and causes and I think these NTSB reports could provide me a lot of examples from which to learn. They remind me of how at college I had a class on business communication and we discussed the communication issues that led to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Thank you for recommending the NTSB reports :-)

The cliff note version: More people die because they're in a hurry/feel pressured and push a marginal situation when they should have known better than you could possibly believe.

This is one of the sadder reasons why scheduled aviation is so safe. When flying planes is your job, why would you ever push your luck? I feel so tired, that storm looks pretty nasty, or the maintenance guy seemed like he had no idea why it's doing that - fuck it, we're not going, get the airline to put you on another plane if there is one, otherwise get them to pay for your hotel, I'm not flying anywhere today.

One safeguard that is needed, and I believe is provided even in the US - is a strong union to ensure that "Because I'll get fired unless we go" isn't the answer. People in safety critical roles must be protected so that "No" is always an option for them.

For private pilots, reasons to push your luck sneak over from real life. To get home before the twins are asleep. To be back in time for work tomorrow. So that I don't miss Trisha's wedding. Because the replacement was very expensive and I can't afford it right now. The fuel prices are lower back home, we'll fill up there.

My CFI said "graveyards are full of people the world couldn't do without, it can wait a day" - important to remember for many things, if you start pushing your luck it'll eventually push back.

“NTSB investigators usually wear sunglasses.”

Meaning that will likely be investigating your weather accident in the sunshine, so you could just wait a short while and fly in that good weather rather than crashing right now.

"The problem with scud running is it often works" - this is really important because if dangerous things killed everyone who tried them, nobody would try them anymore.

But if you put yourself in a precarious position, eventually it will catch up to you, and you HAVE to force yourself to avoid those positions, no matter how tempting.

“We can wait and get there late, or leave now and it’ll take the rest of our lives to get there…”

"Wait and late or now and plow" was mine :)

I wonder if CFIs could basically be replaced by ChatGPT making pithy statements about "don't fly into weather you idiots". Probably too polite, though.

The Swiss-Cheese Model of Aviation Safety is useful to know before reading NTSB reports. It's a good lens to help in understand the context around the reports.

The other way swish cheese is also referred to is 'breaking the chain'. Not uncommon for a bunch of individually minor things to become something major. The beauty of these reports is they help identify links that if removed, prevent the small things from becoming a serious event.

the umbrella term for this in the aviation world is "crew resource management" [0] or CRM.

a major focus has been on encouraging less-experienced members of the flight crew to speak up if they notice something wrong, and ensuring that the more-experienced pilots are open to receiving that feedback instead of adopting an "I'm more senior, I know what I'm doing, don't question it" attitude.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management

CRM is also being adopted by emergency responders (EMTs) and so on. I've started to use it whenever possible in important or high stress situations dealing with people. Stuff like repeating peoples questions to them so they hear your interpretation of what they said. Always responding to questions, even if the answer is "I don't know yet" or "I'm still working on it".

It's like taking a protocol like TCPIP and mapping it onto human interactions to provide a lot more robustness and remove many sources of mistakes.

There are more elements to CRM, but finding good breakdowns of examples seems to be tied up in paid or industry training and harder to dig up as a layman.

Hello! Are there some educational materials for learning about conflict resolution / management you would recommend? If there are, can you please name them here?

for approachable summaries of those accident reports, I'd recommend Admiral Cloudberg's "Plane Crash Series" on Medium [0] and Reddit [1], as well as YouTube videos from Mentour Pilot [2].

the latter's videos tend to have clickbait-y titles to make the YouTube algorithm happy, but the content is excellent.

0: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/e6n80m/pl...

2: https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot

+1 for Mentour, being a commercial pilot himself his insights are fantastic.

A lot of this wisdom is summarized in the book The Field Guide to Understanding "Human Error" by Sidney Dekker. I learned of it from this talk about Three Mile Island: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMk6rF4Tzsg

Similarly, Accidents in North American Mountaineering[1] covers failures and their factors and is good reading.

[1] https://publications.americanalpineclub.org/about_the_accide...

I took a self-rescue course and a list at the end of their handout had such good engineering tips that I shared it with my eng team. Lots to be learned about engineering from climbing/mountaineering. The list was something like the following:

A few pro-tips:

- Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

- Simplicity/speed/efficiency is good.

- Strong is good. Redundancy is good/better.

- Equalization and Extension are a trade off.

- Not everything is a nail so NOT every tool is a hammer.

- Tools that have multiple uses are good.

It takes two major failures or errors today to cause the crash of a commercial transport aircraft. All the single points of failure have been fixed. You'll see this repeatedly in NTSB reports. Failure or event A happened, and then failure or event B happened. Single-event crashes of airliners are very, very rare.

> All the single points of failure have been fixed.

Now you've jinxed it!

Agree with the above, fabulous learning tool. A theme that often dominates is small mistakes deep paid for with blood and treasure at usurious interest rates.

I also recommend Admiral Cloudberg. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/drama-in-the-snow-the-cr...

There's also a lot to learn about the differences in solo work vs teamwork. The swiss cheese model plays out differently when it's GA vs airliners.

NTSB reports for general aviation tend to focus on individual mistakes since that's most often solo pilots with no ground crew, but for commercial flights it's generally a more complex series of mistakes made in a team.

And risks digest.

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