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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"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 ?

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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...

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.

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.

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