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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

...by Kyra Dempsey, a.k.a. Admiral Cloudberg, who has a long series of in-depth airplane crash investigation articles on Medium: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/

This is her Medium article on the LAX runway collision: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/cleared-to-collide-the-c... - with further details that would probably have distracted from the point she's trying to make in the Asterisk article (e.g. that the controller who made the fatal mistake was originally hired after Ronald Reagan fired and banned from rehiring 11,345 air traffic controllers in 1981 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...)

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The USAir 1493 crash happened in 1991, a decade after the PATCO controllers were fired. I have a hard time believing that there is any connection - by 1986 or 87 the controller position has already been fully properly staffed with trained controllers. Throwing the mention of PATCO in a discussion of a 1991 incident would just further a political agenda and add nothing to the discussion.

Yeah, that's probably why she didn't do it. But if you imagine having to suddenly hire 10,000+ people in conditions which made the previous occupants of those positions so frustrated that they went on strike despite not being allowed to, I guess you can't be too picky with who you hire...

The article makes it pretty clear that Washer was not incompetent at her job, and that the role of the PATCO aftermath hiring spree was not to allow her to get hired when she otherwise couldn't, but to push her to apply when she otherwise might not have for specific personal reasons.

A different, and likely more productive, way of looking at a possible connection between PATCO firings and USAir 1493 is in the form of institutional knowledge lost.

I think a decent argument here is that the mass firing of a large portion of existing ATC personnel damaged the institutional knowledge and rigor of the ATC profession as a whole. What highly technical profession wouldn't be damaged by that? And this damage just increased the risk of serious mishap across the board; it suddenly became much more likely an ATC would make a mistake, and this one is one of those mistakes

And if you like this sort of thing, you might also enjoy the various people that do reconstructions on YouTube - the real audio played over animations/flight sim of what the planes are doing. The most interesting/lively ones are those with a 'possible pilot deviation' or 'number to call' IMO if you want a search term to narrow them down.

I'm not a pilot or planespotter or particularly interested in planes generally, I've just fallen down that rabbit hole a couple of times for some reason, can be quite interesting. It has made me wish the in-flight entertainment included a 'listen to pilot/tower comms' option.

There's a reason it doesn't. The last thing any pilot or controller would want is to have something sensationalized or misconstrued and then spewed all over social media.

United Airlines used to have this back in the days where your seat had an audio jack and a few channels of music to listen to. Channel 9 was the audio from the cockpit.

Nowadays you can listen to ATC from nearly anywhere by visiting https://liveatc.net/

I've listened to liveatc.net, and then took a flight in an Extra 330LS stunt plane and got to listen to ATC from an actual headset...

...and I can't understand hardly a word they say. Even having a slight idea of the phraseology from countless hours in MSFS and watching VATSIM streams on Twitch, when it comes to the real thing, they talk so fast and there's so much static that it blows my mind that anybody can understand them at all.

Commercial rated pilot here. It's definitely a bit of a learned skill, but it doesn't honestly take that long to learn, and it works better than any other alternative might. The most important thing is for everyone in the system to be willing to speak up if they don't clearly understand what's been said to them. "Say again slower" is a perfectly acceptable response, and is a required one of a pilot or controller who did not understand what was said.

Controller cadence is a bit geographical - the busier the airspace the faster the tempo, and the more important it is to speak up.

AM simplex radio works amazingly well overall for this purpose, and none of the potential technology that could replace it would be as safe or reliable..

As former aviator working in tech it, amuses me how periodically on this site, someone learns how the aviation community is flying around using GPS and simple UHF/VHF radios and NAVAIDs, immediately goes into a tizzy about how unsecure and hackable it allegedly is, and then goes round the bend about things like encrypted comms and starts answering a question no one asked.

Like, sure, in the military there's the ability to do various and sundry things to secure your comms and navigation which are not worth discussing here. But in the civilian world, there's largely no reason to go to the trouble and expense.

I don't think that's a reason, they're not secret (the YouTube reconstructors I mentioned (legally) get them after all - there are public if paid archives) they're just not available on that system. Just like all kinds of other stuff isn't. I think it's simply niche interest. Plus it's only any good when you haven't taken off yet and are about to land, i.e. the times cabin crew will do what they can to have you not enjoy any kind of entertainment whatsoever anyway.

So, "fun" tale: the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191 crash had a new feature, a closed circuit television system that showed passengers the view from the cockpit. They very possibly got to watch their demise first hand from that camera. For that reason, it might never happen again.

Too bad really. So what if you get to watch yourself die horribly, you die either way! You will still be pasta sauce on the other end of the incident, you really shouldn't care. You might have a stronger spike of adrenaline than otherwise, but that's not going to hurt you any more than being pulverized will.

Thank you for pointing that out! I’m a big fan of Admiral Cloudberg, and was in fact even thinking of her while reading this article, but I did not make the connection. She’s such a fantastic writer.

Does anyone know how she became so good at writing about airline disasters? She doesn’t seem to have any sort of aviation background.

This is however not her usual writing style as used for the blog.

It is, it's just a slightly more formal variant of it.

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