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Comment by resolutebat | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of previous discussion on HN, but IMHO the most interesting one was the early dissection of whether or not the crash was intentional: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29729307

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I don't recall any discussions being particularly interesting because even a cursory, single watch of the video made it immediately apparent that he crashed it on purpose.

Interesting is obviously subjective to the observer, but subjects can be interesting and informative in their detail and not just their conclusion.

That's generally true, but I am reticent to call anything this guy did interesting.

He did a lot of strange stuff (which you probably didn't notice on your first viewing) which people picked apart in interesting visual analysis. For instance, he jumped out of the plane with a mini fire extinguisher strapped to his leg, hidden under his pants. Why? We don't know, but there are several hypothesis.

If you feel the urge to ask me what those hypothesis are - then I think you'll see the point.

> For instance, he jumped out of the plane with a mini fire extinguisher strapped to his leg, hidden under his pants. Why? We don't know, but there are several hypothesis.

I think this is part of my point because it's obvious why: he crashed the plane on purpose in an extremely dry area, so he took a fire extinguisher with him in hopes of extinguishing any fire he started. He concealed it because he was faking the crash. He's also an idiot there as well because it took him a while to get to the crash site, which was much too long for a mini fire extinguisher to be useful.

So see? It's obvious and not interesting. He's just an idiot.

Granted, what the other commenter pointed out is indeed an interesting facet, which is to your original point as well, but it's more to do with engines and planes being interesting.

If I recall correctly, there was a lot of nuanced discussion of different engine behaviors with different failure modes, and how those did or did not match the video evidence. Sound of the engine, rpms, prop behavior, ect

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

FAA investigating controversial crash video - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29729307 - Dec 2021 (414 comments)

If people find the other threads we can add them to the list here.

As one of the people who commented on that thread, it was really eye-opening to see the group dynamics involved between people who have experience in the domain vs those who don't.

It definitely made me look at online debates a lot differently, as previously I thought good points can come from anywhere (which can still happen), but it turns out experience in the domain is usually way more relevant.

I guess it's similar to that effect where if you see news about a topic you don't know, you tend to take/believe everything as-is, but if you happen to know the domain, you'll usually spot quite a few factual errors which tend to discredit most of the news.

Yes. Remember this fact.

My expertise is education. Everyone has opinions about that field. Many, many, many are just completely ignorant.

It's why I try not to weigh in too heavily on areas that I have no practical experience in.

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