Hacker News Reader

Comment by 12_throw_away | Hacker News Reader

Reading the actual NTSB report [1], my first reaction is just my usual awe at the professionalism of the NTSB. They started with a 3000-ft-long debris field and in the end could say "here are the microscopic stress fractures in the left pylon aft mount bulkhead's wing clevis spherical bearing assembly's ball element's forward bearing race".

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/DCA26MA024%20I...

View on HN

I share your awe of the NTSB and their reports. Here's my favorite quote from the Alaskan Airlines door plug incident[1]:

   We determined that the probable cause of this accident was the in-flight separation of the left MED plug due to Boeing’s failure to provide adequate training, guidance, and oversight necessary to ensure that manufacturing personnel could consistently and correctly comply with its parts removal process, which was intended to document and ensure that the securing bolts and hardware that were removed to facilitate rework during the manufacturing process were properly reinstalled.

[1]: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/DCA24MA063.aspx

as a pilot, we attend regular training sessions, often hosting senior accident investigators who continue to follow a strict logical method where you start with nothing, zero knowledge, just physical evidence and recordings, eyes, ears, nose, touch, and I bet the sneaky ones are tasting stuff. It's a small community, everyone has lost a friend, knowledge and information is sought and shared in a very particular way when it comes to saftey and reliability, though of course there are cheats and greed, passive agresives comiting crimes of omission. and so, here we are, again.

To be fair, there were a few folks on x avh and the other typical sites who guessed the cause pretty quickly.

Like most things, guessing and proving require vastly different efforts. In aviation, a few more orders of magnitude than most.

If a few thousand people speculate some of them will get it right. It means nothing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com