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Comment by DanielleMolloy | Hacker News Reader

There is a person on X who says he has left the plane before takeoff and has uploaded videos of non-functional entertainment panels: https://x.com/akku92/status/1933114664923148455

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I guess it’s kind of surprising in a relatively new plane, but I encounter non functional entertainment systems relatively often. They’re not treated like the safety critical systems by any airline

I thought the same but he implies that the screens were not the only tech not working (AC, seats damaged).

It is quite an intuition to decide to leave a plane in such a moment. He just escaped death and is now aggressively attacked for saying something potentially relevant.

It reads to me as if he was on the flight before the doomed flight.

India is a large country, so a plane travelling a route like Delhi→Ahmedabad→London isn't unusual, with passengers able to board and disembark in Ahmedabad.

(There may also be security rules like requiring continuing passengers to disembark with their hand luggage before reboarding. I don't know, it's 15+ years since I took a flight like this.)

He did not leave the plane, he said he was on the previous flight from Delhi to Ahmedabad, before the plane then went on to do the Ahmedabad - London flight when it crashed. You can see his flight ticket in the tweet.

Ok, thank you, didn't realize. He wrote two hours and I expected this to be another long-haul flight.

No correlation between non-functional displays on passenger seats & possible engine failures etc.

They could both point to poor maintenance by the airline

Air India has a long history of poor maintenance. Not many crashes, but lots of reports of poor cabin maintenance, broken electronics, air conditioning not working, etc.

In other words, they are the "No green jellybeans" clause, proving the vendor didn't thoroughly check all the details.

I'm a system engineer - the hardware kind, not the more familiar network kind - and that is my job.

While obviously the color and type of candy does not matter and I understood the reference, I can't find anything on google when I look for "no green jellybeans" so I wanted to link what you are referring to which is the "No brown M&M" clause that Van Halen had in their contracts:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

Is the inflight map for the passengers on the minimum equipment list?

Sure. But it could imply a lack of maintenance.

I mean technically there is a correlation, it’s just very unlikely to imply causation.

"No correlation between non-functional displays on passenger seats & possible engine failures etc."

No. No no no. This is wrong, mistaken thinking.

A minimum standard of operations and attention to detail must be adhered to for high consequence / life critical endeavors and that behavior (culture?) must be enforced at all levels throughout the operation.

Ignore this heuristic at your peril - as either a consumer of these services or a provider who must demand high performance from your workforce.

Remember: flight attendants have (rarely exercised) critical health and life safety responsibilities. What messages do they internalize if this is the fourth flight in a row the coffee maker has been cracked and out of order ?

Sure, nice brown M&Ms type relation. But I've encountered entertainment systems failures on Virgin, Emirates, Qatar and they're all among the safest airlines according to this https://airlinelist.com/

The M&Ms were for cases where the show was likely to be considerably more demanding than what the venue normally handled, and they needed to make sure that the people running the place actually stepped up for it.

The organizations doing aircraft maintenance are always handling life-critical stuff. You don’t need a weird test to see if they’re paying attention.

It’s not like this stuff is just decided ad hoc and planes fly with broken IFE equipment because of bad culture. This stuff is worked out by engineers and regulators. There’s a list of stuff that needs to be working for the plane to be allowed to take off. If something on that list isn’t working, you don’t fly, even though the plane may be perfectly capable of it. And I guarantee the IFE equipment isn’t on that list.

Frequently broken passenger amenities indicate bad customer service but it doesn’t reflect on safety.

I don’t think this is necessarily the case here.

Airlines are large and heavily regulated organizations, and passenger amenities (once successfully certified) might just not be in the loop for mandatory maintenance cycles and certifications.

Maintenance of IFE units vs. avionics or the airframe itself might as well be performed by completely different contractors, maintenance crews etc.

It’s wildly unrealistic to expect maintenance to fix 100.0% of issues, and to fix them immediately at that. There’s a balance to be struck with on-time performance that will naturally prioritize safety critical maintenance while postponing cosmetic repairs until they can be performed without schedule pressure.

Eventually it all folds into one management org, that is the whole issue.

I wouldn't expect two parallel cultures in a org, one for safety, one for entertainment systems.

My point is more that non-functional infotainment on one single flight is just simply nowhere near enough data to judge a whole organization.

hmm. theres a theory that the faulty entertainment/AC power bus could have played a role in a cascading power failure if a rare known edge case called a FADEC reboot were to occur.

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1lb7knp/air_india...

Swissair 111?

Correlation just helps lead you to common causes.

Not a cause but and indicator.

Normal for Air India and not relevant to the accident. Tata has been trying to resolve the previous owners poor management of the airline.

Who leaves a plane due to entertainment being down?

You there to watch a old movie in 720p or to go somewhere?

Wow the 787s look so dated compared inside compared to even a320 neos!

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