Exposing yourself to first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive since the actual findings can rhyme with the false speculation closely enough that you wind up muddling the two in your mind.
Flick through last weeks newspaper if you need reassurance.
If something is truly pressing, you’ll hear about it from friends or coworkers.
For me, that largely entails just not doing anything. I do own a car but rarely use it since my neighborhood is very walkable, and the tank is usually close to full. Even my lawn tools are electric. But if I relied on gasoline for a commute (for instance) then being able to make good guesses about getting hold of it is advantageous, in a way that is fungible and easily shared.
If you don’t watch television news, flipping through the channels can be genuinely surprising. Because if it’s Princess Diana’s birthday, I almost guarantee one of them will be running a retrospective segment.
Somehow I’ve ended up primarily reading their daily recap in the app. They already have a full article on this crash. That usually means it’ll be in the magazine next week.
I just unsubscribed from the digital edition. A neoliberal and globalization bias in overall tone.
Way back when I was in college 20 years ago they ran a very funny article poking fun at all the PhD's doing "deconstruction" on The Economist. Like super post-modernist fluff. I could tell the writer had a great time responding to it.
Their punchline: "so there you have it - a newspaper to make you feel good about tomorrow by promoting capitalism today!"
Available in many languages
Le Monde is owned by a French billionaire: https://www.alliancemagazine.org/blog/democracy-in-france-de...
Would love other sources, but it’s hard to find anything with similar depth and a similar lack of sensational-ization found in most news.
Edit: Oh, and global reach. The economist covers earth in almost equal detail for every region. Not quite equal of course, but darn close compared to most outlets.
The main section feels pretty anti Trump, actually. Not by choice but reality has an anti Trump bias ;)
They are also quite good at labeling their opinion sections clearly, which I think a lot of other papers aren't doing. Their news section is basically Reuter's.
In my experience, WSJ just reports what happened and who said what in a very dry way.
My impression is that their news section provides a very anti Republican party view. Note that this is my impression, not the paper's stance. They don't really take any, apart from the opinion section, which I ignore. The opinion section has a massive pro republican bent.
> Lying by omission
I'll admit, I might have a blind spot here because I'm only reading 2 newspapers. That being said, I'm not sure of any stories reported by the other news outlets which were ignored/downplayed by WSJ.
> apologies and retractions
Happen when they happen. I remember a few per month. But since they're so dry, there's very little scope for major corrections. If they say, "this guy said that", there's very little to correct there. Occasionally, they mis-paraphrase someone and have to correct their report. Most sound like honest mistakes to me.
EDIT:
> You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
Fair enough, but you mostly don't get any points to counter in the first place. Only plain dry facts. I go to the Economist for opinions and counter opinions. (*side note, the Economist should publish more counter opinions IMO)
Between the Economist and WSJ, I get a good overview of opinions and facts.
It comes out daily.
It might just be sensational and of course they repeat it, just like they'd send on a chain letter/email etc. back in the day.
Form your own opinion, based on multiple source plus your own judgement.
I think the essence of these statements is less that you should literally listen to whatever distilled amount of world news your coworkers are talking about and take it as fact, but that if it's remotely necessary for you to even be aware of, let alone have an opinion about, it'll present itself somehow in real life. After that, if it qualifies as relevant to your life, then go about searching for more info, but a vast majority of anything you could hear or read about or watch probably doesn't qualify.
Government policy, sure, if you need to respond to or act on it somehow. Conflict in the middle east? Sure, if you or someone you know has ties there. But again you'll probably just hear about it because it's directly impactful, or you can monitor specifically for those updates using narrow channels.
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1l9hqzp/air_india...
Heck, Spiegel does that with news on the same day. You get some background article without starting with the facts of what happened, as if everybody reads the news every two hours.
“news” detox is as important as a healthy or non existent interaction with social media.
This is one of those exceptions that prove the rule though, I think.
[0] I had this conversation with people multiple times so it must have been common
Of course in practice there really was plenty of it to go around, dollar stores seemed to be the most flexible at navigating the supply chain derangement and if you didn't mind buying it by the roll, it was never really hard to find.
Also- you don't need to follow the news for there to be a panic, empty shelves will do that all on their own. Everyone deciding to stock up a little on everything was enough to deplete shelves, people walking in after saw empty shelves and stocked up more, etc. I don't think most people were following the "omg supply chain" news, they just saw depleted shelves.
It's also common in Asia (at least South East) they can survive without toilet paper :) The Japanese even have entire water jet massage toilets, they do it like a king.
Or if you don't want to use water, you could use serviettes, tissues. Even newspaper.
That's why I didn't understand the fuss about it. Sure it's annoying if you run out but not the end of the world especially when you're at home where there's always a shower to hand. I don't understand that people were so obsessed with toilet paper.
What would be much more important is food, water (in my city the tap water is terrible so I don't drink it), medication etc.
Not to mention how gross cleaning yourself with dry tissue is.
I think many people in countries like the US or northern Europe wouldn't even know what it's for when they see one :)
COVID was a perfect case study of mass hysteria, and how you can't even trust "the experts" in these situations, because the "experts" you hear from early on are also generally the ones who are the most willing to spout pure speculation for attention. Humans are gonna human, and a background in science doesn't change that fact.
But it doesn't matter for what I'm saying: paying too much attention to the news about a weird new virus from China would have clued a person in that something big might be coming, on whatever dimension you care to measure it.
The Covid pandemic lasted much longer than would have been reasonable to prepare for via hoarding of supplies etc.
In my view, that was the entire problem: Much of the world overreacted in the short term (hard lockdowns including fining people going for a walk by themselves etc.) and underreacted in the long term (limiting avoidable large indoor gatherings such as most office work, air filters etc.)
Many governments did as much as people would tolerate for as long as they could (which meant, for some, doing nothing at all), rather than focusing on doing effective things they could actually keep up as long as required.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but I really hope that’s a lesson many learned from it.
John Tuld: If you're first out the door, that's not called panicking.
—Margin Call (2011)
Most consequential decisions are made, or built up to, over a long time. Sure, somebody has to call moment-to-moment balls and strikes, but if that’s not literally you, your weight in the world might be better applied in slower, quieter, subtler places.
Am I morbidly curious about a plane crash? How could I not be? But the NTSB didn’t earn the credibility they have by parachuting in day-of and shooting from the hip. If anything, their processes provide discipline against first impressions blinding them to true causes.
For those who haven’t encountered Admiral Cloudberg, this is a good opportunity: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/
This pattern would result in a far better-informed voter than one who diligently follows the news all the time but doesn't read many books. The amount of news you need to read to make informed decisions at the ballot box is usually tiny, if you have the background to understand the news—and if you don't, consuming more news won't help much with that. Meanwhile, it takes a ton of close book-reading before you start to see diminishing returns on that front.
When an election happens, I can do a search of news on the candidates, and for discussions of the other issues put to the voters. In the meantime, by avoiding news, I can save a lot of distress about news that I can't change and doesn't have an immediate effect on me. (Nobody in this thread, including me, is great at avoiding news, me included... really important events tend to bubble up anyway, and all of us clicked into a discussion of an event that's probably not personally relevant)
It'd be different if a cat delivered tomorrow's paper to my door; I might not like it, but I'd have a duty to read that paper and try to make right what once went wrong.
Going cold turkey from the "news" doesn't make me any less informed about what is happening in the world, if anything it has made me more informed as I'm no longer just a vessel filling my brain with whatever some billionaire wants me to believe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_News_%28book%29
If there were a problem with holes being dug in the city people are not exacerbating the problem if they choose to just not dig holes.
Not everyone needs to be informed an act on whatever it is that others think is important. This belief really forms the backbone of the current, "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality.
Whatever the cause is, it's entirely possible to just treat people decently without caring about who or what they are. That's where we should be encouraging people to get to, not demanding they jump into action.
Most of the news we see has no actual effect on our lives anyway. Like this crash. It's terrible but other than feeling bad for them (which doesn't help them) it doesn't affect my life in any way. If I find out about it at a later time that's fine. Probably when admiral cloudberg makes one of her masterpieces about it. I read the news anyway as a matter of interest and "nothing better to do" but to me it's mostly a time sink. I only read about 1% of the articles in the main feed.
I often go on retreats with friends and I hardly use my phone and the TV never goes on for even a second :) It's really nice to unplug. I can recommend having an unplug day once in a while for starters.
Even for people that read news out of necessity, it can be curtailed down to only the relevant topics and the dryer outlets. I am one of those people, and the need to stay up to date doesn't justify the junkfood.
I stopped reading/watching/listening to the news about 2 years ago and I am blissfully unaware of what is going on in the world. I read hacker news every once in a while and even comment on some of the stories shown here but I select very strictly the topics I interact with.
News organizations these days are all pushing an agenda. Whether it is pro [insert-topic-of-choice-here] or against [insert-topic-of-choice-here] and that irks me when they represent themselves as impartial and unbiased.
If I want to read some propaganda, I know where to find it.
Nowadays, we know exactly which outlets are leaning right or left, there is clearly no doubt about.
Furthermore, I would argue that the news outlets squandered the last bit of credibility they had during the COVID period when they silenced views that were not deemed acceptable at the time.
Finally a lot of news outlets are in some parts funded by the very same governments that they are supposed to be reporting on and keep in check. How can you do your job properly without any bias if the person you are about to write about/criticize is the one who signs your paycheck?
The answer is that you don't.
Regarding the original sentiment though, uninformed vs misinformed...
Isn't this basically just good old signal processing? We either don't have enough signal, or we're saturated with noise. Economic feedback loops keep the news noise at a saturated level; we don't seem to be able to collectively agree or incentivize having a spot of information spectrum that has a decent discernible signal.
The "free" press is no more free than it was 300 years ago. Then it was owned by despotic interests. Today, it is owned by need to make money.
Unfortunately it doesn't appear to have a digital option?
And I've just seen that you CAN get The Guardian Weekly digital subscription here, free if you've got a print subscription? Though obviously I'm wondering why the Guardian don't advertise this?
I'd also feel bad getting some dead trees filled with chemicals and flown across the pond then someone driving it out to me, all that environmental impact when I could just download it.
If anything they get complaints of being left leaning sometimes. While our government is (well, was, it just collapsed) a hard-line radical right wing one similar to Trump.
In the end, I think the most accurate place to get your news from is a history book.
Most daily news is quite factual, assuming a reputable source. It doesn't require detective work the way plane crashes do.
And when it is incorrect or misleading, a week usually won't make a difference. It takes months or years or decades for the truth to come out, often in a book by a journalist or historian who frames it as a "tell-all", or a Pulitzer Prize-nominated series of newspapers articles, etc.
And that could itself be a tangent in the conversation, alternate theories. (Or might be a frustrating one if nobody is receptive)
Horrifying that it came down in a residential area with almost all its fuel still on board though. The aftermath is beyond belief.
Also as an engineer you can actually learn a lot about technical and social failures.
I can mostly only speak for my own industry (software engineering), but subjectively, it seems like we lost a lot of institutional knowledge as well as organizational structures through Covid that will take a while to rebuild.
Between people going into early retirement (I heard aviation was hit particularly hard by this), people changing careers and their replacements not having much in-office spin up time etc., and some industries/markets never returning to in-person work at all when it used to be common before, I have some theories on where we lost both.
What I can't work out whether that's recency bias, or because I've been watching a lot of MentourPilot with our daughters so I'm simply more attuned to this kind of news, or if there really are more of them.
I certainly don't know if the rate of incidents per passenger mile flown is higher than usual.
Since the deadly DCA collision in January, there are things making the news now that would never have in the past, so it seems like it's worse. Especially if the plane has "Boeing" written on the side. For example, hitting animals, tire blowouts, or ground equipment bumping into planes, which grounds them for inspection. When I worked for a major airline, those things are all actually pretty common and happen everywhere, all the time.
It's just a method used to stoke fear and feed clicks.
People find the most minute thing to complain about. Recently, there was an article about the antiquated FAA system using floppies. While the system is old and showing it's cracks, saying it uses floppies just makes it sound worse then it is. As of 2020, our mx crew were still plugging a Windows 98 laptop with DOS into Embraers and Bombardier Dash8s, and used floppies in Boeings (no Airbus or ATRs in our fleet for comparison).
Not all crashes are created equal. A 10 person Cessna disappearing near Nome, Alaska !== mid-air collision above the Potomac.
If you're looking at US news sources, I don't think you need to resort to clickbait and fearmongering to justify the increased focus.
Here's a list of plane crashes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incide...
I remember long ago he said he would not report on crashes but that's what people want so no blame..
The irony of it is that a couple of months back I was sat in the living room watching MentourPilot, she came in and asked what I was watching, said "Ugh, boring!" Then she sat down and started playing on our Switch... and then she just got sucked in to the episode, and is now completely obsessed with watching MentourPilot. She often knows what's gone wrong and what the pilots should have done instead before he even explains it.
So the guy's all right with me and absolutely welcome to make as much money as he can: he's a great educator.
He has one of the best air crash investigation journalists, Kyra Dempsey (aka Admiral Cloudberg) as one of the writers on the channel.
They already have a YouTube Short listing the facts of the crash, and also have a longer video about the Jeju one. Only the facts, no speculation - they're waiting for the preliminary or even final report to make a full in depth video on it.
Boy, you must be upset about pretty much everything on the internet. Except for hn. Paul Graham just runs this site out of his own benevolence, nothing else.
I really don't know what you are talking about.
Media isn't free, especially well produced media that's taken it's time to research.
TBD on the cause, but loss of engines for some reason seems to be the case.
I do agree that a lot of info comes out first week that isn't all right. I'm just reciting what's been shown in videos.
Of unknown provenance, with unknown visual artefacts, et cetera. Even if completely legit, with context and thus chain of causation obscured to the point that discerning ultimate and proximate causes is impossible.
The city the incident took place in has a subreddit. Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself. It's a bit NSFW at the moment.
It’s not. It’s one video of unknown quality and relevance, picked somewhat randomly out of all the other available videos and data, the most relevant of which aren’t publicly available.
> Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself
It’s the usual emotional coping through baseless speculation. There are healthier ways to deal with uncertainty amidst tragedy.
We know it called mayday and then lost communication. It also stopped transmitting GPS data.
Looking at this it likely lost all electric power. The electric power comes from generators driven by the turbines.
If you lose both turbines you lose electricity. You also lose the hydraulic system so you can not get in the gear or change flaps.
Occam's razor checks out.
By the way, the age old rule is "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" in that order of priority. So it could be they just had their hands full with the Aviate part.
I guess they're just for the time until the RAT kicks in. Or to augment it.
Ps there's also the APU, a small turbine in the tail for generating electricity.
On the professional pilot forums the consensus guess is inadvertent flap retraction, instead of gear retraction, leading to inability to climb.
Not at takeoff weight with the gear down, this sentence is incorrect.
There is a dump fuel button if you're not in the middle of a populated city and you're far enough in the sky you've got a few minutes.
It's primarily needed for weight management in planes that can take off heavier than they can safely land. I.e. if the plane had enough control to abort the flight and return to the airport, then it might have been appropriate.
most planes can't dump fuel anymore. if it's a serious enough emergency you land overweight. If it's not then you fly long enough to burn it off and land below max landing weight.
When fuel is dumped, it's at high altitude where it just evaporates.
Short haul jets can't do it, but their max takeoff weight is around their max landing weight, so it's fine. For long haul, it's not the same.
This is true but irrelevant to this crash. Most commercial jets are smaller (A320, 737 etc) and can't dump fuel.
Long-haul jets like the 787 do have the capability.
https://www.boeing.com/content/dam/boeing/boeingdotcom/comme...
They did this because they are parasites that value a few $$ over human life.
Everyone knows it after the MAX.
Everyone involved in MAX (including engineerings) should get a live in prison without pardon.
Sincerely, A fellow engineer
For example, when MH17 was shot down by the Russian-backed rebels, they posted celebratory posts to twitter (they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport). Also, pictures of the actual SAM battery were taken as it was rushed back to Russia in the coverup. A few hours later all that got deleted and the spin machine started. "No, there were no Russian SAMs there", "it was a Ukraine fighter jet that shot it down", etc. They even fabricated fake radar tracks. People saying it was a SAM were denounced as conspiracy theorists, stuff like that. Only a year or so later when the official investigation started finishing up, the truth was confirmed.
In that case (as the investigation later proved) the earliest information was the most accurate. This is especially the case when there are powerful interests that don't want the truth to come out. Even Boeing covered up the first 737MAX crash.
That's why I think it's not a bad idea to read all the speculation. But keeping in mind that there is no definitive answer until the official accident report comes out. Any of the speculation could be true. Or even none of it.
And really, getting it 100% accurate in my mind is not something that matters. I just read it as an aviation enthusiast (and ex-pilot). What matters is that the experts writing the report are accurate. And later admiral cloudberg who expertly translates all that into normal-people language :) Whether I have an accurate view of what exactly happened really does not matter in this world.
Also, in many cases it is already clear what happened, like that ATR recently that was in a flat spin. The part that isn't clear is how it got into that situation. But the "what happened" is also important and that is one of the things you can often read about early.
https://www.youtube.com/@pilot-debrief/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AirSafetyInstitute/videos
I'm reminded of the crane collapse in Seattle that had pictures afterward and the pins were no longer in it. The expert analysis I had seen discussing it had said the pins don't just come out in a crane collapse, and where the join the sections the crane would be at its strongest. He was, of course, lit up by those with possible agendas saying "you can't speculate". He was right in the end.
So with the crane collapse it was interesting to see it all play out, but it's a matter of keeping perspective. There were literal pictures of the pins not being in place. Explanation that those pins should not be removed until later in the disassembly of the crane. Then there was the other "side" hurling accusations at him. Finally the official report.
Keeping perspective to me is that yes, I want to know what caused it. But I'm also interested along the way that some people/companies/govts seem to have a vested interest in shaping the story. So I don't run with any of it, but I try to remember who said what, even though nobody ever seems to be responsible for being batshit crazy.
The game theory problem is probably that if everyone does it you have to do it too.
Like I strongly support equals chances, but if I e.g. get discriminated against for being a white heterosexual male -> it kinda forces me to vote against it
But jumping to conclusions serves a variety of human emotional needs. And in an attention economy, that means it also serves a large industry's economic needs.
One week ?
Wait until the damn official report comes out. That's how long you should wait.
The investigators have access to more than you or any other armchair investigator or journalist will ever do.
For public discourse, one week is fine. At that point you usually have ground facts established. A common official understanding of the known knowns and unknowns is available, together with a good profile of the leading conspiracy theories that one can filter out.
One has to wonder if this was a bird strike incident on both engines that maybe having 4 engines would have allowed the plane to circle back around.
The passengers could just take turns going out and pushing.
But it is somehow implied that the context of the comment is normal driving conditions.
Perhaps that comment could be reworded like:
>When driving on a highway, while not being pursued by the police, on planet Earth, with a road temperature below 200C, and not driving behind a van transporting nails with an open door that's dropping them on the road, why don’t all four tires on a car blow out at the same time?
That way people could get a better sense of what it is about.
(In that case they were at cruising altitude, so had time to handle the situation and relight the engines).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ewa7R20MA
Lufthansa 747-8 after engine failure:
*We're not an emergency.*
Most airlines avoid nowadays the invest into maintenance of four engines airliners. Others have prefer the additional transport capacity and margins. Lufthansa has it's own maintenance branch "Lufthansa Technik" and doesn't need to handle extra costs. Emirates needs the huge capacities of the A380.
PS: The 747 can and does - if necessary - ferry flights without passengers and only three engines. Not possible with twin engine planes.
I think it's more that they needed the prestige of having the biggest planes, offering a whole bedroom with shower etc. It goes well with their ultra luxury image.
If it's just about seats that can fly smaller ones with the benefit that they can operate more frequently and thus attract more transit passengers looking for a good connection. That's their main market.
An A380 is quite a hassle because most airports can't even handle one.
Connect major hubs like FRA with JFK and it makes sense. You need capacity, it is a long route and slots are rare and expensive. And for Emirates the hub concept is crucial.
But yes. The luxury thing is also part of their show. But it fills the plane ;)
Many operators dropped the 380 during COVID. Makes sense but they never took them back on afterwards and passenger numbers are higher than ever before now. The A380 is cool but it was built for the past not the future.
Aircraft can land (in right circumstances) by gliding in sans power .. the same cannot be said for take offs.
Aborting above V1 is heavily discouraged because usually there's a strong risk of running off the end of the runway. Of course, if you lose both engines above V1, you're really in trouble and left without much choice.
But we don't know what happened with this flight so nothing I've said here should be taken as indicative of whatever went wrong in this case. It's purely information.
[0] Which depends on many factors including the type of aircraft, loading, weather conditions, state of the runway surface - for example, wet, or iced - etc., and needs to be calculated afresh for every take off.
An airliner in the US did it and the pilot was praised for making that hard decision. Everyone walked I think. I forget which flight.
One a plane reaches v1 during takeoff, it can lose an engine and still takeoff.
It an engine was lost before v1, the takeoff would be aborted.
Here is an Airbus doing just that.
There are many factors at play and things are complicated by unexpected failures.
Thank you for the video that demonstrates a pilot aware in advance of planned "engine failure" can cope with such an event in scheduled test conditions.
The phrase "line kilometres" might indicate a smidgeon of aviation industry adjacency to some.
EDIT: Above and below comments appear to be low grade random sniping in bad faith.
There's a failure to address content and specifics and a straw assertion about "more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators", a claim that was never made.
At best I have the same insights as anyone that worked with 20 airframes for a few decades and staged them about the globe in that time.
EDIT2: Symbiote has deleted their problematic reply below that the first edit was made in response to. The michaelt reply came after the reply by Symbiote and is moot, all my statements are here, undeleted and unredacted.
Any time after it’s too late to abort takeoff.
Pilots should be able to “regain full control of the aeroplane without attaining a dangerous flight condition in the event of a sudden and complete failure of the critical engine…at each take-off flap setting at the lowest speed recommended for initial steady climb with all engines operating after takeoff…” [1].
[1] https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/downloads/136694/en 25.143(b)(1)
It's _exactly_ the kind of comment that deserves to be downvoted here.
It's curiosity, it's learning, it's looking for an explanation.
That's exactly the kind of comment that deserves to be here.
>[...] who doesn't have any relevant expertise,
Is that a requirement to comment on this thread?
Do you fulfill that requirement you brought in?
If I'm wrong, then apologies to the OP.
We won't know until we have all the details and the exact cause of the shutdown.
So I was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2. The vast majority of airplane accidents happen at takeoff or landings, if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore.
Also I would venture that 99% of comments on public forums like this are from people without expertise. My expertise in this space is a curiosity about planes for a few decades, taking some actual flying lessons, and being generally interested in aviation to go to airshows, watch youtube content from pilots, etc. I probably have about the same aviation knowledge as an average HN person.
Impossible to answer until we know the cause. If it was independent powerplant failures, then yes. If it was e.g. fuel contamination, pilots improperly shutting down the engine, some other crap failing, then no.
Speaking as someone with aerospace engineering and GA pilot experience.
Larger jet engines are more fuel efficient than smaller ones, because larger diameters allow for more bypass air and therefore more fuel efficiency [1]. It is a function of size and a lot of the engineering goes into materials and designs to be able to increase size and maintain strength. So you simply can't make 4 engines that are as efficient as 2 large ones, and that is compounded by the significant additional weight (and drag) of the duplicated engine parts and mounting structures.
>if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore
Everything comes with tradeoffs. Adding more engines mean more complexity, more maintenance, more chance of single engine failures, etc. You don't want to introduce more failure modes than what you are trying to fix. The move to two engines for large aircraft and the evolution of ETOPS (Extended Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards) involved a lot of people considering a lot of scenarios. I can guarantee the "why not 4 engines" question has been studied extensively.
[1] https://simpleflying.com/why-do-jet-engines-keep-getting-lar...
Unironically, you're probably way more qualified than most of the people here throwing rubbish at you.
A classic on places like this.
Apologies!
Smaller turbofan engines are less efficient than larger ones. This is because they have a lower bypass ratio - thrust generated by turning the big fan over the thrust generated by combustion.
So expect even bigger engines.
[Edit: yeah, yeah, forgot the Tom Hanks movie, sue me. I do wish folks would respond to the much more important point below, which isn't invalidated by a single data point though.]
Constructing solutions for multiple-mode failures like this is a bad engineering smell. Almost always the solution isn't actually helping anything, and often makes things worse in whatever metric you're looking at. In the example here, having four engines makes the chances of total thrust loss lower, but it doubles the chance of a single engine failure. And the literature is filled with incidents of theoretically-survivable single engine failures that led to hull loss as a proximate cause (generally by confusing or panicking the crew).
The most well known double-bird-strike incident is probably the one where Sully landed a plane on the Hudson River.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549#Takeoff...
-edit: ok, everyone had the same thought, haha -
There certainly have been bird strikes that disabled all engines.
There was this very famous double bird strike https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549
But in the video of the plane taking off and crashing, there's no clear, obvious, or tell-tale "poof" of bird turning into exhaust as there often is in bird strikes.
That doesn't rule it out.
Selection bias
The lower the barrier to entry of the subject matter the lower quality the people discussing it. This crap is like the Kardashians for white nerds with stem degrees.
The people with the requisite dozen brain cells to common sense realize these problems are complex and keep their mouths shut.
What? It happens multiple times a year. They made a movie about a famous incident (US Airways Flight 1549). There's even events with four engine strike (Eastern Air Lines Flight 375).
So far this year, it's happened at least twice resulting in engine failure.
Jan - Air New Zealand NZ207 - aborted take off following dual bird strikes and both engines damaged.
~~Mar - Ryanair FR 4102 - dual bird strikes on landing resulting in injuries and hull loss.~~
Before that, in December 2024, Jeju Air Flight 2216 crashed on landing following dual bird strikes, resulting in the loss of all PAX.
These aren't as rare as you believe they are.