A pilot crashed a full passenger jet into the bay, didn't lose his job (2021) | Hacker News Reader

A pilot crashed a full passenger jet into the bay, didn't lose his job (2021)

sfgate.com

110 pointsStratoscope105 comments

I once ran a stop sign, and nearly hit a car. They pulled up next to me, rolled down their window (I had stopped at my home) and were about to unleash who knows what kinds of profanities at me, and I just said "That was totally my fault. I didn't see the stop sign. I'm sorry."

They stopped dead in their tracks, shrugged and nodded, and left. Owning mistakes is an extremely powerful tool when used correctly.

Also, aviation accident investigations aren't really about blame but about future prevention. Even if the outcome is pilot error, it's more about preventing how this error happened in the future than to punish the pilot. Because nobody (well.. almost nobody, think GermanWings) does this on purpose. Either training, information overload, disorientation etc. And also the cooperation of the pilots is paramount. That doesn't really work if they're getting themselves in trouble.

Having said that I don't think a current NTSB investigation would take "i f--ed up" for an answer. They'd want to know why and how. But those were very different times.

Also it's extremely rare to find no pilot error. The regulations broadly say "pilot must get acquaintanced with all aspects regarding flight safety" intentionally, so pilot could not say "I didn't know" -- must have known.

But sometimes the pilot followed correct procedure, and the correct procedure was to blame. In those instances the procedure is changed.

Yes or the correct procedure was not correctly written up in the flight manual, not trained on, too hard to find in a pinch etc. Or the situation was so complex it was hard to identify which procedure applied.

True but these days it's very very hard to know everything actively. There's just so very much.

It's understandable when a pilot forgets about that one obscure button that's only used in some edge case only happening on one in 100.000 flights.

These days being a pilot is a lot like being a system engineer especially since the dedicated flight engineer position is gone. Yet also requiring the spatial awareness and manual skills of flying. I'm often surprised how well it still goes with the complexity of modern aircraft.

> I'm often surprised how well it still goes with the complexity of modern aircraft.

Most of that "complexity" are systems that help the pilots, reduce workload and possibility of error. It's really hard to crash a modern airliner.

"It's really hard to crash a modern airliner."

When everything is working as it should be. If it isn't, you want the pilot to understand what is not working and act on it.

I don't think GP is saying anything to the contrary, just that you can find 'pilot error' because however unreasonable that is what is expected.

Essentially the same as ignorance of the law not being a valid defence. I do not know all the laws. I am nevertheless held accountable to them if I am (allegedly) found in contravention of them.

> It's understandable when a pilot forgets about that one obscure button that's only used in some edge case only happening on one in 100.000 flights.

They have recurrent training so they don't forget about those buttons though.

I wouldn't say "extremely rare".

Mechanical failures, maintenance errors, ATC errors, bird strikes, incorrect weather forecasts, etc. are all very common accident causes that are not attributed to pilot error.

EDIT: This article cites a study saying that 69% of general aviation crashes in 2020 were due to pilot error. The remaining 31% is, obviously, still a large number!

https://pilotinstitute.com/aviation-accident-causes/

General aviation stats might not be entirely applicable to commercial aviation, of course. The planes are less redundant, less well maintained, and flown by less experienced crew - it's hard to tell which of those factors will tend to dominate, or whether they cancel out.

Commercial airliners tend to fly themselves to a large extent.

Most of the aircraft used in general aviation are about as good at flying themselves as a motorcycle.

I don’t think this is entirely accurate.

The incident investigation might conclude pilot error, the NTSB isn’t responsible for punishing pilots.

Law enforcement might though, and the employer may too.

That just isn’t in the NTSB report.

I really wish this wasn't the shocking revelation it is, but holy fuck, a ton of people just refuse to do this.

I've done it all my life, personal and professional. I will (not happily, but I will) explain how I fucked up, and why. But similar to your experience, this catches people completely off guard. They don't expect it and I know why, because in my interactions in turn with people who also, categorically, fucked up: they will NEVER admit it. Most people will die on the hill of not just owning a simple fucking mistake and it's so bonkers to witness. Like... it's fine. You're human. You made a human error. Just like... acknowledge it so we can get on with whatever?

Heck, I'll do it happily. I don't enjoy screwing up, but owning your mistakes is the first step to improvement.

I can't think of many better ways to demonstrate to your colleagues and corporate overlords that you are worthy of their trust than to readily hold up your hands if you've screwed up.

So long as you're not so incompetent that you're repeatedly doing stupid stuff or cynically causing issues so that you can make yourself look virtuous by owning up, of course.

In corporate context, admitting exernally-facing liability too easily violates executives' fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. For incentives aligning, need to figure out how to unravel that beasty.

On the contrary, I think it can be sold as a PR win: Think about how many companies torch customer goodwill by making a bad decision and then doubling and tripling down on it for months (before backpedaling and losing a ton of customers anyways).

I don't know, but I'd hazard a guess: not many? Or rather, plenty do, but they don't lose much customers - any company worth their salt is positioned to screw over their users, unintentionally or otherwise, with little to no consequences to its business.

Unfortunate but true.

It’s so refreshing when people do this and it totally disarms most people who are angry with you.

I also find it effective when talking to people that may not be angry at me specifically, but angry at the company I work for. I may not have written the code that fucked up, but I certainly can apologize on behalf of the company and empathize with the user. I’ve found when I do this I’m able to quickly get to a solution rather than degrade further into finger pointing.

Fwiw, I don't see "disarming" as a particular goal or win. It's neutral maybe. It might even be a bit unjust if we think the aggrieved is owed some form of recompense.

I guess my framing of these things goes something like:

* Person A made an error that made things worse for Person B

* A sorta owes B now. Could be A making up for the error—like if A knocked over B's coffee, A could get them a new one. Or another, perhaps disagreeable, sorta justice is B now getting to do something back to A—like B knocking over A's coffee, or just cursing at A for a bit.

* These things would put them back to even.

I feel several comments are thinking of "owning the mistake" primarily as a tool to neutralize B's ability to get back to even. This, rather than owning it to take responsibility or just because it's honest. Saying we're "owning our mistake" is not owning our mistake. The point is to know you were in the wrong—whether that's by introspecting on it, having to buy an extra coffee that day, or getting cursed at.

I think maybe you're thinking it in the wrong way? If A immediately owns up and apologizes, B not getting into a frenzy of swear words is not only good for A, but it's good for B, too (unnecessary stress and getting-worked-up is probably not really good for us!). Clearly if they were still upset (despite the apology), they might still feel the need to yell and vent a bit, and if they do, perhaps they will. But if they don't, then likely the acknowledgement of fault and apology has been appreciated, and B has gotten out of it what they need to.

For something like knocking over a coffee, certainly, the knocker owes the knockee a new coffee, and acknowledging fault and apologizing is the first step to getting there.

(B retaliating by knocking over A's coffee is always going to be unproductive and childish, even if A is unrepentant and rude about it.)

I agree that just saying that you own your mistake isn't enough; owning it means doing the best you can to make amends. But sometimes the person you wronged is fine with just an acknowledgement and an apology. For example, if someone knocked over my coffee, and it seemed like a genuine mistake (that is, it wasn't because the person was being careless or negligent), I probably would accept an apology but decline a new coffee. The apology would be enough for me. Not saying that it would be for everyone, but people are different.

A caring about B is a good point. If A thinks to themself, "Crap, I effed up. I should apologize. B will be mad, what can I do to make B feel better? I could buy them a coffee", that's pretty good. If A thinks, "Crap, I effed up. I should apologize and reconsider wrestling near people's desks", that's also pretty good. Ideally, both the reflection and the coffee would be nice. If I had to choose just one, I'm leaning towards the latter as owning the mistake more than B being made whole with coffee, but that's debateable (and might be where we differ).

If it's, "Oh, B will be mad, what can I do so that this doesn't take too long? I could apologize and buy them a coffee", it feels less right. It inches toward that phrase that goes something like "the fastest way to get someone to shut up is to agree with them." It might be true in a practical sense and yet it's woefully sociopathic.

When I'm dealing with an upset customer on the phone, disarming means that we can move past the "I'm pissed at you, why can't you fix your stuff" useless conversation into the "how can we help you" much faster.

In other words, disarm means the "emotional" center of the brain can safely disengage and the logical center can take over. When someone is angry, most likely, their emotions have taken over and, once that happens, you're going to spend a lot of time dealing with emotions and not moving toward a mutual solution.

Therefore, if you look at it this way, how is the pure emotional response from the aggrieved helping them get to a sort of recompense? I would argue the short answer is that it is not helping at all, it's just pure lashing out. Which, of course, could be a rational response to the situation. However, no matter how justified the aggrieved may feel in lashing out, the act of lashing out itself doesn't actually move the needle.

If I can show compassion and empathy toward the customer, including saying the simple words "I'm sorry" I'm trying to move out of the emotional state and into a logical state where we can come to some sort of agreement on the next course of action. I'm not trying to "get out" of anything, just trying to literally disengage a part of the brain that is not doing anyone any good for either party.

To your point though the apology has to be authentic. And, yes, I do empathize with the customer's anger in the moment. I've been there myself. So I can easily put myself in their shoes. Of course, as the great philosopher Daniel Tiger says, "Saying I'm sorry is the first step, now how can I help?" [0]. So unless you just want to enrage the customer further, you need to immediately follow that apology up with action - in my case, it could be escalating to the right engineering group, finding a workaround, helping identify the root cause, whatever it could be...

Hope this helps clarify. I'm in no way trying to "pull one over" anyone. I truly want to help - which is probably why it works so well.

[0] https://pbskids.org/videos/watch/saying-im-sorry-is-the-firs...

  disarming means that we can move past the "I'm pissed at you, why can't you fix your stuff" useless conversation

I'm not so sure this part is "useless." It's not the most pleasant part (particularly to the perpetrator), but it is deserved. It would be like catching a thief, having the possessions returned, and the thief arguing that punishing him would be useless because everything was returned. Getting yelled at might be the punishment. Having to buy a replacement coffee (in my earlier example) could also be it. It would be weird to assume the perpetrator has the largest say in the matter.

  disarm means the "emotional" center of the brain can safely disengage and the logical center can take over. When someone is angry, most likely, their emotions have taken over and, once that happens, you're going to spend a lot of time dealing with emotions and not moving toward a mutual solution.

There of course can be benefit to toning down the emotion, but this part is grayer than described imo. It isn't exactly the perpetrator's place to choose when and whether the victim should chill out (assuming they stay within some limits). I find there to be a latent privilege (for the perpetrator) in the framing of a lot of this. The perpetrator has shifted from taking blame (in the sense of consequences, not apologies) to moving on. Some of moving on can be meant well for sure, but the shift is there. The reason they "have to spend time dealing with this" is because they caused it. Those are the consequences of the mistake. Again, getting yelled at might be the solution. To encourage wrapping up the emotional part is to encourage moving past the parts that are uncomfortable for the perpetrator—which also might explain the perpetrator's inclination to "find a mutual solution" sooner than the victim.

This is an aside, but I find this shift in a lot of places. Someone double parks on a busy street, a person gives them a honk (doesn't lay on the horn, doesn't curse them out, doesn't flip them off), and the doubleparker gets pissed (lays on the horn, curses at them, flips them off). This seems a rather common scene today. One honk is a fairly low form of accountability for the inconvenient/selfish behavior, but culturally we often treat the honk as the bigger faux pas. We expect the driver to "chill out" and "move on" and don't expect the doubleparker to accept the tiny consequence let alone own the mistake.

I think this may ultimately involve some amount of personal philosophy. I would stand by the notion that disarming shouldn't be a particular goal of owning mistakes. It focuses too much on the victim. Owning mistakes is a kind of hygiene for the mistake maker (which they/we often skip) yet the victim is getting a lot of scrutiny. Totally agree that saying "sorry" is only the first step of being sorry—that phrase has been used by friends/myself before, though I didn't know it was a wider one. Thanks for the thoughts, definitely no concern on my end about intent.

Being a programmer has made this a lot easier for me.

The average line of code that I type has three typos and one syntax error, so I'm accustomed to making mistakes (and fixing them).

Typically such people were punished severely for admitting mistakes as a child, while lying about it and pretending nothing happened was "fine" and got them off the hook.

Was it the apology that affected the decision or did rolling down the window reveal demographic information that make it easier for them to justify in their mind going easy on you?

For example nobody except another old lady is gonna scream at an old lady.

Edit: Some of you seem to have missed the point about human nature here.

chill with the -isms. Watch youtube to see how crazy some people are

- 6'0, 30s guy that has had many old lady scream at me due to temper tantrums

>6'0, 30s guy that has had many old lady scream at me due to temper tantrums

Exactly. They don't hold you to a lower standard. If it was a teenager they might've cut some slack. Most people will cut an elderly person or a person who's very outnumbered by kids in the car a little slack. Etc, Etc.

So perhaps that person in the other car looked at you and decided for whatever reason you deserved to be held to a lower standard than they project upon everyone if no other information is available.

He didn't hold me to a lower standard. He accepted my apology.

One thing a like about getting older is the increasing frequency of reminiscing.

I used to cycle commute to work. This one time I caused a guy to miss a gap in traffic, wasn’t something I was trying to do, just the timing worked out that way.

I saw him starting to curse, I don’t think it was directed at me, but I blew him a kiss anyway.

The cursing transformed immediately to a bust of laughter from both of us, I think made his day.

I also cycle commuted for 3 years, year round, in my late 20's and early 30's. It was the best. I miss it.

It's funny, because depending on the location/culture/etc. of the incident, I could see the blown kiss making the guy even more angry (assuming he was indeed cursing at you). Good on him (and you) for handling it gracefully.

The extremely powerful part imo is what it implies about the person owning the mistake and how they might change future behavior because of it. I think it's less about the effect it had on the other person, who as you point out was entitled to anger and low expectations of you. Can it (powerfully) de-escalate things relative to how these situations often play out? Yes, but if the goal of owning mistakes becomes about minimizing the consequences you face for them, it seems more meh. If it's to recognize mistakes and be accountable (particularly to yourself), it seems more powerful.

I worry a bit about the "when used correctly" part because it suggests only owning mistakes sometimes, but it could be read many ways.

I imagine there are situations where, while internally owning the mistake is Important, it can be harmful to own it in front of "stakeholders"

Perhaps I should have said "When used genuinely"

You didn't see the stop sign on the road by your house?

Did you forgot it existed, or was it a not completely honest apology?

"Are you not a perfect sentient entity?"

Nope, that is why I asked if he also simply forgot it and not assumed evil.

>or was it a not completely honest apology?

Oh it was completely honest! Really! For some reason my brain just didn't see that stop sign, on multiple occasions. Yes, literally on the opposite corner from where I lived.

Brains are weird.

> Owning mistakes is an extremely powerful tool when used correctly.

Truthfully, I believe I have this attitude to thank for why I've never been fired as a software engineer.

I'm not stupid, but I have a pattern of making mistakes that goes way back to childhood. I can mitigate it but probably will never reach a normal error rate. Any time I cause a problem, no matter how severe, I just own it and make sure anyone affected or involved in mitigation gets their due credit. There is just no sense in pretending a spade isn't a spade when there is a learning opportunity to be had, or making an already tense situation worse.

This was the interesting part for me:

> When asked what went wrong, he simply replied, “As you Americans say … I f--ked up.”

> Captain Asoh’s frankness and self deprecation helped him preserve his career. Rather than get fired, as was expected, the airline merely demoted him to copilot, before allowing him to work his way back up to captain a few years later. He went on to captain hundreds more flights, all of which landed successfully.

> The “I f--ked up” reasoning, or what became more eloquently known in legal circles as “The Asoh Defense” is used to prove that sometimes a frank admission of guilt is the easiest way out of a pickle.

Reminds me of a case in healthcare, where a hospital found genuine apologies were way more effective than stonewalling to try and avoid liability.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/saying-sorry-pays...

> When a treatment goes wrong at a U.S. hospital, fear of a lawsuit usually means “never daring to say you’re sorry.”

> That’s not the way it works at the University of Michigan Health System, where lawyers and doctors say admitting mistakes up front and offering compensation before being sued have brought about remarkable savings in money, time and feelings.

But they have to be genuine, not "We found the button to press to get the best result."

Plenty of people can fake genuineness. It doesn't have to be genuine to be effective, it just has to be well received.

Once a sufficient number of people have peed in the pool the strategy fails to work: this physician is incompetent and dug in, that physician is incompetent and dug in, another physician who is incompetent and refuses to own up, and here's one who is incompetent and pretends to be sorry.

In many Islamic justice systems, there is an option for the offender to pay money to the victim to reduce penalty. I think there are many cases where this could work in a non-Islamic culture, but many people are afraid that "rich people can buy their way out of trouble". There is some truth to it, but the victim may feel the outcome is better after payment.

Joel Spolsky wrote about this roughly 20 years ago on JoelOnSoftware. IIRC, he hired a locksmith to copy a key and the key didn't work. After the third (and likely final, because of how irritated he was getting) try going back to the shop, the locksmith took a closer look at it and said, "I'm sorry, I see where I went wrong." Instantly, situation defused from major annoyance to "OK, this guy just made a mistake, I'll try it again."

This book - https://www.amazon.com/Sorry-Case-Good-Apologies/dp/19821634... - has an entire chapter dedicated to this.

Hmm yeah but the US legal system is kinda out of control with ridiculous claims and damages granted. If you're going to bankrupt a doctor, it becomes much harder for them to tell the truth.

Can you substantiate this claim?

The problem in the US: Accepting guilt may open you to gross negligence with can incur triple damages. As a result most bog standard legal advice in US tells companies to never admit fault when sued. It would be nice to carve out some kind of exception a genuine apology.

There was also a Radiolab episode that discussed this idea at a different hospital...

https://radiolab.org/podcast/apologetical-2303

I wish more people knew this… it actually works amazing. Taking responsibility for your mistakes and, better yet, explaining exactly what went wrong and how you will prevent it in the future almost always turns out better, and builds more respect and trust than trying to deny or shift the blame as is usually done. Learning this radically improved my career progression, and personal relationships. It also takes the power away from people that would use it to manipulate or control you.

It's important to note what you're describing is taking real ownership of your screw ups. Like you said, that means doing what you can fix them and prevent them from happening again. Simply saying 'that's on me' and doing nothing to change isn't what's meant here.

And yes, I have done this my whole career and it works.

Good point- I often see, especially in corporate press releases about security incidents, etc. an apology (often without even directly saying they are responsible- or with a company but no actual individual people taking responsibility), but then no explanation of what they are actually changing to fix the problem. Or there will be a “designated fall guy” who was not personally involved but is apparently paid with a prearranged “golden parachute” to resign and take the blame, which is just a deflection strategy to avoid actually taking responsibility while appearing to do so.

That works for American aviation because there's a strong culture of avoiding blame. Instead of taking punitive action the usual course is to look for a root cause and how to avoid it. That extends as far as drug/alcohol use where if you miss a flight because you've checked yourself into whatever program you're pretty much guaranteed to keep your job. Show up drunk though and you'll find yourself in jail.

There's an interesting discussion on an aviation forum about landing in an unapproved situation. The question was whether the response should be termination or training. Lots of folks weighed in, favoring termination. However lots of those same folks pointed out that their employers had a no-fault go around policy — as in you probably wouldn't even have to fill out paperwork for aborting a landing. Own up to whatever mistakes, go around, and land safely – nobody cares. Double down on unsafe behavior, nobody's going to want to fly with you.

Such a culture is nearly essential to actually do real high stakes things- there is really no other way to operate in any field where the consequences of failure are immediate death, which isn’t limited to aviation. Only in fields where the people have no real skin in the game do people get away with not taking personal responsibility.

It also depends on the severity of the consequences of the error. If people had died or been seriously injured in that water landing, I don't think Asoh's "I fucked up" acknowledgement/apology would have saved him from getting fired, or at the very least getting the same demotion, but with a longer and more difficult road to reattaining his Captain title.

I don't think it holds up in court, however.

Pro tip, I've gotten out of more than one speeding ticket by doing this. Trick is to make it look like an internal struggle.

"Do you know why I pulled you over?" "I think I was going a little fast." "Any reason why?" "I was just-- No, officer. I'm sorry, I made a bad decision."

It’s funny how this would simply be an unacceptable answer in a root-cause-analysis. “I fucked up” basically just means “yea, someone else might make the same mistake, nothing to be done to prevent it”.

I disagree. Most places I've worked, "I fucked up" is an acceptable response in an RCA as long as "I fucked up" isn't the end of the analysis. You shouldn't just be to throw your hands up and go, "well I guess nothing can be done then". People will fuck up, but you can do things to protect them from themselves, limit the blast radius, and make recovery smoother.

From my own life, I worked at a start up early in my career and dropped the entire production database. I was troubleshooting a production bug and had the prod DB open in one terminal window and my local DB open in another. I meant to drop my local DB and instead typed it into the prod terminal and that was that.

In the RCA we didn't just end at "I fucked up". The line of questioning went beyond that into what gaps allowed that fuck up to be possible which lead to action items around restricting access to production data to only those who need it as well as ensuring we had proper backups (thankfully, we did at the time) and ensuring we had runbooks on restoring data in the event that it happened again.

> [..] had the prod DB open in one terminal window and my local DB open in another. I meant to drop my local DB [..]

I feel like every single one of us who has worked in this role has this same story, haha. Mine was iTerm split panes, but still. Over a decade ago and I still have my own little system I (now) adhere to ensure that never happens again.

I'm a big fan of shisa kanko [1] as practiced by Japanese rail workers. Every time I go to make a change to a critical system I deliberately say out loud what I'm connected to, what I'm about to do, and why I'm doing it as I confirm these assertions before taking action. If at all possible I have somebody else on the call watching. I'm sure it looks goofy to my colleagues but I'd like to think that it helps to avoid these types of mistakes.

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j...

Lol. Now that you say it, I'm thinking back and I'm pretty sure mine was also iTerm split panes

And changing the look of the prompts?

Agreed with this: the real question is always to ask how it got to that stage.

Like a reasonable answer at all times to this problem is things like: why did you feel like you had to work this way? Why was it even possible to do so? Why was no one else aware this was happening? Why did no one else feel empowered to halt the process if they did know? etc.

That sort of personal fuckup is just...never actually a personal fuckup, not when the collateral damage is so large. "I was logged into production as superuser" has the obvious follow up issues of "why was it easier to do that then have a correctly limited account?" (this one happens all the damn time - want a new account? Well here's 10 pages of justifications we need...also no versus "fix production now, just grab superuser from the password DB...)

EDIT: And I don't say this as (1) someone who hasn't done this and (2) someone who hasn't ever been using superuser to debug production.

In addition to the usual backup/restore policies, at $previous_workplace we disabled the "normal" prod DB admin accounts from running the usual suspect destructive queries (drop, alter, update, etc.) on the production DB. If you really needed to run something dangerous, we had a script named FuckUpProduction that

1) made you wait one minute before it would do anything to give you time to reflect on your life choices,

2) made sure to begin a transaction so you could roll it back before it was too late,

3) showed you the affected tables & rows,

4) made you type "FUCK MY SHIT UP" to confirm and

5) pinged everyone in our #DBA channel "<username> is about to fuck up production by running <query> affecting <rows> in <tables>. To stop them from doing something stupid, type STOP or NO" and aborted if anyone did so within the waiting period.

Anyone having to use FuckUpProduction was treated as a process failure and we did the whole RCA song and dance to determine why the normal testing/deployment process was insufficient. When FuckUpProduction was designed, some team members expressed discomfort at the use of profanity. This was considered a feature. We had a "swear jar" in the office that you had to put a dollar in if you were ever saved from accidentally running a query in prod either by FuckUpProduction or by the restrictive DBA accounts. The jar had enough money to buy a pizza before I left the company.

4) made you type "FUCK MY SHIT UP" to confirm

That is amazing, will inspire myself.

I feel like you are in agreement with the post you replied to.

> In the RCA we didn't just end at "I fucked up".

You didn't end at "I fucked up" because "I fucked up" is not the root cause. It is not an acceptable answer to the question that root cause analysis is seeking to answer. Which doesn't mean you can't use the phrase to communicate, it's just not an acceptable answer.

I like Dan Milstein's take on this, from "How to Run a 5 Whys (With Humans, Not Robots)"[1]:

> ...when we say "I won't make this mistake again", we're basically saying "Here was the problem: I was stupid once, and I'll never be stupid again, and neither will anyone who runs this business."

(The whole talk is worth watching, it's only 14 minutes long and it's very entertaining.)

1. https://youtu.be/78qzrXIPn5Q?t=559

"...Captain Asoh somehow managed to guide the plane onto the water and into the mud below without a single injury to the 100 adults and seven children on board, beyond a bloody nose."

A+ landing: zero fatalities and your airplane can take-off again on the same day.

B landing: zero fatalities.

The standard joke among pilots is: if you can walk away, it was a good landing. If you can re-use the plane, it was a great landing.

Then this must count as a great landing!

> While everyone aboard safely went about their strange day after the crash, the plane was left with $4 million of damage, though it was fixed up and flying again less than 12 months later.

That depends on how many ships you think Theseus has owned.

For those of us who are not pilots, but have played with flight simulators: in case of an emergency where we have to take the controls the airplane already belongs to the insurance company, try to save your own life.

> Captain Asoh was the last to leave, and returned to the plane after ensuring everyone was safely ashore to gather and return the passengers' personal belongings.

> A language barrier between Captain Asoh, who spoke little English, and his American copilot, Joseph Hazen, was also partially to blame, as the pair attempted to use a new instrument landing system for the first time. But at the NTSB investigation, Asoh chose not to blame any of those factors or make any excuses. When asked what went wrong, he simply replied, “As you Americans say … I f--ked up.”

Talk about being responsible for ones actions. This man is a model.

> pair attempted to use a new instrument landing system for the first time

This is the real root cause: insufficient training. They should have both used the system before in training situations on a nice day when they can look out the window if they don't understand something. Unless they are test pilots for the maker of the landing system (which they were not because this was not a test situation) they should have had a qualified trainer teach them how to use the system and plenty of hours of in the simulators using this system in situations much harder than the one they encountered.

Did simulators exist in 1968?

Yes. Not as good as today but they existed. They also had instructors

> insufficient training

Indeed this is a fuck up. However I did not see it mentioned anywhere in the article that there were any training requirements in place. Perhaps both pilots assumed that the instruments would be similar to what they were used to and were confident they could read/operate it.

Another thing is I don't like how the article does not mention this missing fact and the take away of Asoh's admission of guilt is a management lesson to admit mistakes. Instead, from this fact I had predicted it to be: Airline management should take responsibility for allowing two unqualified pilots to fly that aircraft. There was no process in place to ensure that pilots are qualified to fly the aircraft they are piloting full of people.

In the year this happened we were not as strict about training. They should have had more but it wasn't common.

saddly this lesson still hasn't been learned about driving.

" If the plane had come down in any other part of the bay, such as the 30-foot deep waters to its east or the dry flats to the west, Flight 2 would have either sunk, or likely set ablaze"

Wait wait wait, plane fuselages don't naturally float? I always assumed they did?

They do for a bit...

I doubt they are water tight, so eventually they'd fill with water. It's not like they're designed for space and need to be perfectly sealed

You have about 20 minutes depending on the plane and it being upright. The Hudson plane stayed up for 24 minutes.

They're certainly not airtight. There's intentional leaks in a pressure cabin. This is used to regulate the pressure, there is constant engine bleed air flowing in. If you allow more air than it leaks out the pressure will rise, if you lower the airflow it will drop. This mechanism also takes care of refreshing the cabin air. There's also some catalytic conversion going on to remove the high ozone content that's present at high altitudes.

But I think it's pretty hard to ditch a plane without damaging the fuselage to some extent.

I mean, depends how hard you hit, and people need to get out... Water is not soft at ~150 knots; even Flight 1549 in the Hudson's perfect ditching resulted in the plane sinking when they opened the doors.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Air_Flight_1549_r...

In this case, the ditching wasn't really intentional (the Hudson flight knew they were going down; this one just... flew into the sea due to fog), so it could have looked more like this if they were less lucky:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ditching_of_Ethiopian_Air...

Per Wiki:

> Asoh later stated that he realized the plane was too low once he spotted the water after the plane broke through the fog with an air speed of 177 mi/h (285 km/h). He grabbed the control stick to gain altitude and advanced the throttles in anticipation of having to abort the landing and perform a go-around, but the plane's main landing gear had already struck the water...

The Hudson flight was very challenging flying, but they did have four minutes of "we're going down", and enough time before "we're going down in the water" to do things like raise the gear.

flight 1549 took on a fair amount of water, but did not sink completely

https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/comments/7qse0g/us...

maybe it would have had it not been tied up, but it never did.

>even Flight 1549 in the Hudson's perfect ditching resulted in the plane sinking when they opened the doors

Because a passenger freaked out and opened one of the aft doors before an FA could stop them.

IIRC for 1549 there also wasn’t enough time to run the checklist and so they didn’t press the “ditch switch” which closes off a bunch of vents, although given the damage to the aircraft skin it’s not clear whether it would have made a difference

DC-8 a 1950's jet in 1968 so modern buoyancy may not have applied. Everyone made it to shore without getting wet and the airplane was back in the air within a year. Remarkable.

"I f*cked up" is something I've had to say several times in my career as a dev. It's in the nature of things.

The copilot had an interesting life [1]. He flew for the CIA during the US’s unacknowledged war in Laos.

[1]: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/josep...

Unrelated other than being an airplane incident, but I recently was reading up on BOAC flight 911[1] while in Japan, and the full story about how many other air disasters occurred to Japan that year, the plane taxiing past the wreckage of the previous day's crash, passengers who were on BOTH planes, and the Albert Broccoli connection.... just crazy.

Oh and I happened to be on JL2 on Friday, which thankfully landed uneventfully on the tarmac at SFO.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911

Those were different times though. Aviation safety has become really good especially because of all the thorough investigations and things actually getting fixed. In those days passenger jets were fairly new, there was still a lot of cowboying around in cockpits (no 10.000 foot rule, no crew management standards), there was no standard phraseology (which caused the Avianca fuel exhaustion crash). So many things have been learned.

I learned about this while growing up after hearing Jerry Harvey talk about it (mentioned in the article). I actually used to keep a picture of the pilot with the words "we salute you" as a reminder of how to handle mistakes. No one ever got the connection.

This works when you are dealing with an organization that is run by sensible and wise people who are focused on building a better organization by building better people

This does not work in places where you are a number, or a cog, or readily replaceable.

> While everyone aboard safely went about their strange day after the crash, the plane was left with $4 million of damage, though it was fixed up and flying again less than 12 months later.

Crazy times.

It is a very, very important lesson to learn: how to understand and acknowledge ones failings.

The impulse is to defend, as failings are weakness and represent instances of unattained agency. In this day and age, agency is all you've got, most times. One feels the need to protect it at great expense. Have you ever noticed how crap it feels to over-defend something that turns out to be an abundant triviality?

So, to have the wherewithal to turn those weaknesses into strengths is an extraordinary human endeavour, and a testament to the strength of human spirit.

When people say that there are only material things in life, it will be interesting to consider this story where the moral principles of Captain Kohei Asoh led him to maintain his agency over his life as a pilot by protecting (superlatively), the lives of his passengers, in a material and ethical sense, and admitting the mistakes made in light of actual success.

Would the 'I fucked up' conjecture feel different if he were uttering it from the ashen mess of a death bed, with far worse survivor basis behind the statement?

The spirit is clearly composed of decisions, remembered for win or fail. Seems to me, a strong soul prepares for this eventuality, in perpetuity... I have to wonder if Captain Asoh was also, incidentally, a very good pilot.

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