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Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

> where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English

Maybe I’m missing something but wtf does being able to speak English have to do with the ability to maintain an aircraft?

Is everyone at Embraer or Airbus or Bombardier expected to speak English?

I’m starting to feel like this is some kind of gaslighting. Boeing aircraft have had major design flaws that have resulted in the death of hundreds of people, why suddenly are we seeing discussions about maintenance?

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> Maybe I’m missing something but wtf does being able to speak English have to do with the ability to maintain an aircraft?

From TFA:

> The work is labor-intensive and complicated, and the technical manuals are written in English, the language of international aviation. According to regulations, in order to receive F.A.A. certification as a mechanic, a worker needs to be able to “read, speak, write, and comprehend spoken English.”

We’re talking about maintenance workers, not ATC. Not to mention that the FAA doesn’t necessarily apply to foreign workers.

I mean how can Vanity Fair claim on one hand that English is a necessity for FAA certification, and on the other hand claim that these workers don’t speak English? Is this a fault of the airlines, the maintenance workers, or the FAA? Or is it just xenophobic reporting? Do workers in Mexico even need to be FAA certified? I know for a fact that’s not the case for LAMEs in Australia.

In terms of the technical manuals, the ones for Boeing may well be in English, but I suspect the ones written in Brazil, France and Italy don’t start life in English. And the use of English is certainly not universal in aviation (just see how often Simon complains about accident reports at AVH).

On the one hand, totally reasonable to ask “what does speaking English have to do with building airplanes”.

On the other, the vast majority of technical and scientific literature worldwide is English language based. As is all air traffic control. So, reasonable chance the maintenance manuals are in English.

That said I am with you on disliking the implicit xenophobia in the question.

+1 to this. It would be more work to write the manuals in multiple languages, and there could be slight differences in making, Nonetheless, I bet this would be worthwhile. Or maybe there is a language better than English for the manuals.

> wtf does being able to speak English have to do with the ability to maintain an aircraft?

If the maintenance crew speaks one language, and airline management, pilots and regulators speak another, that’s a problem.

What's the name for this logical fallacy? The last few months the trend has been that every single problem that affected a Boeing plane in any way, 99.9% of which are maintenance issues, are blasted far and wide all over HN, Reddit, mainstream media, everywhere, and every single one of them is taken as some condemnation of the company and their planes as a whole. Now, we get an article pointing out worrying maintenance patterns and the response is "so what? don't look at that, why do we care about maintenance issues?". Tomorrow some mechanic will forget to tighten down an engine cowling and it'll come loose in flight and the video will be front page on HN and the comments will be about how horrible Boeing is. So yes, I do care about maintenance issues and their causes.

4 hours after I posted that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39967474

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