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Comment by Game_Ender | Hacker News Reader

The author is positive because of all the safety layers that existed and staid intact, despite how flawed humans and companies are. The culture of looking at previous accidents like the UA232, where they lost ann engine and ALL controls with it, meant the A380 control system was engineered to take even more damage and it worked.

I do agree though it did not spend enough effort focusing on the areas to improve:

- A computer controlled engine that runs for 60 seconds while on fire, and lets a dangerous part spin too fast. It seems like something that should of been covered ahead of time.

- An engine manufacturing process that is so complex it’s almost impossible to validate.

- A fault management system that only shows you 1 or 2 at a time when you have 40.

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> - A fault management system that only shows you 1 or 2 at a time when you have 40.

As long as the system prioritizes the warnings/cautions with the most pressing ones shown first, this is a very good thing. In a high-stress situation, you don't want the pilots to have to deal with figuring out which of the 40 warnings need to be taken care of first.

…none of which did happen. Checklists are not made for “prioritization”. Checklists are not made for “high-stress situations”. They simply had to do that because that was the intended way to diagnose a complex black box. If you don't have an hour to hang in the air, bad luck. There is an obvious unusable model of operation, and you praise it for being good… because someone said it's good?

We're not talking about checklists. We're talking about the ECAM warnings/cautions/advisories display. It's a well known fact that overwhelming human operators with large amounts of information all at once is a bad thing -- even just in aviation, there are numerous examples. That's why there's a 'clean cockpit' rule that the FAA enforces; Distracting pilots with either useless, or extraneous and not immediately actionable information one average, causes worse outcomes. Checklists largely come into play once you start acting on the ECAM warnings.

Also, as the article says, the pilots did their job following the aviate, navigate, communicate mantra. They first made sure they had the appropriate time to follow the checklists, and only then did they proceed to follow them.

There's over 100 years of aviation experience backing many of these procedures and approaches to dealing with problems. Many are hard-won with literal blood and lives.

The situation can be described simply as «no one had expected such a grand connectivity failure to happen, so The Computer and The Manuals were not as helpful as they could be in finding out what worked and what didn't». That's it. Why are you coming to me like you are manager with 50 volumes of printed bureaucratic runarounds under his belt?

> The situation can be described simply as «no one had expected such a grand connectivity failure to happen, so The Computer and The Manuals were not as helpful as they could be in finding out what worked and what didn't». That's it.

Did we read the same article ogurchik? This situation was not simple, and the computer and manuals were as helpful as they could be given the unknown situation.

All I was trying to point out that your assumption about the ECAM system may be ignoring some reasons for why it works that way. No need to be a salty pickle about it.

I suspect the ECAM only showing a couple of failures at a time is a design feature, not a flaw, to prevent overwhelming the crew as they work through them

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