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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

Turning the fuel off seems roughly equivalent to turning the ignition off when you've parked your car. It's really something rather unlikely to do as a brain fart during takeoff.

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But we can already conclude that something unlikely did in fact happen, otherwise there were more fatal 787 crashes. I don't think "it's unlikely" is a good argument for dismissing potential causes here.

Most commercial aircraft have quite a few more buttons, knobs, levers, dials, etc than a car.

You have to lift and turn these knobs. Hard pressed to think of other knobs like this one. Especially that there are none like it anywhere near those cutoff switches. It seems intentionally designed this way

Commercial aircraft pilots are also much better trained than car drivers.

They do make an effort to make it hard to do safety critical stuff by accident though in cars, small planes and jets. Like in a car it's easy to mix indicators and windscreen wipers which are on various stalks but turning off the engine and locking the steering is very different action, on traditional cars turning the key and taking it out. Similarly here the fuel cut offs are obvious levers that have to be pulled out before they can be moved.

Putting your phone in the fridge seems like a pretty crazy thing to do, but we do it sometimes. Plane crashes are very rare.

I don't fly a lot of planes, but I do know what muscle memory is like, and sometimes it misfires. Misfires are rare, but then, so are plane crashes.

The emergency fuel cutoff should not be a practiced maneuver.

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