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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

As a civilian, I would have expected that if there's anywhere where you're supposed to follow protocol even if it means expensive mistakes happen, it's the Marines. My mental model of the military, and especially the Marines, is that it's an organization that values discipline and prioritizes following the chain of command.

That's even more true if getting it wrong means you could die.

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A pilot is expected to follow procedure when that's called for but ultimately has full responsibility and can make any call they want. Procedure is never going to cover the range of scenarios you can run against and there's no time to reach out to the chain of command when something goes wrong.

Ejecting could save you but send the plane crashing into a city, and that's just one of many scenarios.

If he was flying with instruments in bad weather and felt that he could not trust those instruments that seems like a good reason to eject since you can easily end up in the ground or a mountain. I don't know if switching modes like he did was standard procedure and if the resulting failure was unusual or not. Maybe he wasn't familiar enough with the airplane's systems. That said, there was a real failure that seems to have happened at the worst possible times.

At the end of the day, the bar is set really high for someone in this position.

> Maybe he wasn't familiar enough with the airplane's systems

It seems that a highly qualified marine test pilot is unlikely to be unfamiliar with the airplane's systems

He has less than 50 hours in that type.

Until you get to actually fly it for real, you read the manuals a few times over, do countless hours in the simulator and so on.

Those 50 hours can be misleading as to his experience with the aircraft.

A stimulator comfortably positioned at FL000 is much more amenable to troubleshooting multiple electrical failures than a tin can balancing on computer-controlled thrust differentiating, 1900 feet in the air well below stall speed.

You are missing the point. Incidents do happen, but you just don't get to fly a fighter jet until you proved in a simulator that you are capable of flying it and troubleshooting it. What the simulator does is to see if you can be entrusted with the aircraft.

Yes, but decades of experience have shown that pilots are far braver and willing to risk their skin in a simulator than they are in the air. And for good reason.

> I don't know if switching modes like he did was standard procedure and if the resulting failure was unusual or not.

Pilot switched mode back to normal flight because it was the switch to landing mode is what caused his HUD and PFD to turn off in the first place.

I don’t know about the US marines,

But I served three years in the Swedish army and wasn’t taught to obediently follow command when it makes no sense. I was taught to disobey illegal orders.

I can’t imagine a fighter pilot has so little authority over their actions like you describe.

Actually, the US military is successful more because they prioritize on the spot thinking and only deferring to the chain of command in specific circumstances. As much authority is pushed downwards to the lowest level possible. That’s why the military is so effective tactically, though the high level strategy lately has been rough. The war on terror was overall ineffective, for example, but the troops had a ridiculous k/d ratio. Another part of the success is from training. There aren’t many militaries who train as much as the US military.

That's because you're a civilian and you don't understand how Naval Aviation works. Reading straight from the NATOPS manual for my old aircraft: "It provides the best available operating instructions for most circumstances, but no manual is a substitute for sound judgement. Operational necessity may require modification of the procedures contained herein."

Aviators are not expected to be checklist-executing drones who "follow protocol." They are expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of their aircraft's systems so that they know when to follow procedure, what the procedures are designed to do, and what to do when they have a situation where the existing procedures don't apply or conflict with each other.

In my old community, it was a commonplace occurrence when requalifying in the simulator for instructors to deliberately insert situations involving multiple malfunctions whose emergency procedures conflicted with each other, such that blindly "following protocol" would cause you to die.

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