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Comment by zuppy | Hacker News Reader

same Alaska that knew there is something wrong with the pressure, but decided to continue flying with their plane, just not over the water: https://apnews.com/article/alaska-airlines-portland-oregon-e...

not saying they’re completely guilty, but they do have some part of the fault in that incident.

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Pressurization problems are not uncommon in aviation. Most planes will drop to a safer altitude or divert to "safer" routes in case something goes wrong. They did what they are supposed to do in those circumstances.

I'm finding these type of apologists comments placing fault towards the airline really hard to sympathize with.

How would you feel if you were on a flight where a door fell off, and the pilot said "only 2% of flights on this specific plane have had unexplained depressurization, and now we have an explanation, folks"?

They hadn’t had unexpected depressurization. They had an error in one of the redundant automatic controllers for pressurization. That controller isn’t even required equipment.

Airplanes fly around ALL THE TIME with equipment that isn’t working. They have a procedure for determining what is and isn’t necessary for a given flight both legally and by the airlines own standards. In this case it very much looks like the pressurization controller was a red herring.

I was on a flight where the ADS-B transponder failed (the captain told us after takeoff) and they got approval to change routes, lower the flight ceiling and we continued on our way.

It's a tough question. If a plane starts behaving a little wonky, per sensor, but you can't figure out what the sensor is complaining about, and the sensor doesn't match human observation, do you have to throw it away? What fraction of planes would be discarded under this model?

"I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation and let it fail. It should then be a simple matter to track down the cause."

You don't have to throw it away. Just ground it and test.

Pressure loss can be mitigated by dropping oxygen masks and descending to a lower altitude. The plane falling apart is more tricky. The door leading to pressure loss is a red herring. What about a wing falling off?

I don't think the wing fell off the plane and there are several types of failures which are distressing short of the wing falling off.

The wing was an exaggeration. Plenty of other critical parts could fall off.

Apropos the discussion of the warning lights, it sounds like there may be some human factors engineering issues as well.

https://youtu.be/5FcyvFfHsjQ

It would be nice to get the black box data, but Alaska mishandled the box and allowed it to write over data from the flight in question. Oops.

I don't understand why you are being downvoted. The pressurization warnings are a recorded fact.

What I have not heard is if the problems with the door plug are connected to the warnings.

Alaska followed standard procedures in aviation for pressurization issues. Downvotes are probably from people with aviation knowledge/experience.

Thanks for that explanation. I'm ignorant of the inner workings of the aviation industry.

Edit: If that warning was, in fact, an indication of the door plug problem then perhaps the reaction to that warning should be reviewed.

NTSB has said there is no indication that those warning lights were correlated, and that the pressurization system is triple-redundant and only the first layer was generating warnings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGWLBLb9Pm4&t=521s

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