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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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