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Comment by marcosdumay | Hacker News Reader

There were other near accidents before due to the exact same problem, the problem was well understood, and the changes needed to solve it was known.

Air France didn't implement them and Airbus didn't require them because of money. They thought the chance of it causing a real accident was low and decided to risk it. Despite there being known near accidents already.

And yes, "[the pilots] training should have been better" is part of the things that put both companies at fault. It's not the pilots fault that their training didn't cover it.

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> Airbus didn't require them because of money

I am pretty confident that aircraft manufacturers themselves cannot require these things, only regulators can. The FAA in particular used to lean heavily on budget constraints for airlines (who would also push back against expensive upgrades); but I am sure the same applies to EASA and other regulators as well.

That's right, Airbus is responsible for the faulty equipment onboard, not pilot training. Air France is responsible for its pilots' operational training and recurrent training.

It's not that black and white. Airbus will be responsible for educating Air France too and giving appropriate training. These planes are not purchased by Air France without significant documentation and access to support.

Ahh good to know, thanks for clarifying.

They should be able to recall a plane for a safety flaw. In which case they have to pay for the upgrade themselves.

If the airline doesn't comply afterward, it would be on them.

But they didn't issue a recall, so they wouldn't have to pay for the fix, an over 200 people paid the price instead.

At least, that's how I read the blame distribution.

Do we want airlines that only put in fixes for safety issues once they are forced to?

Fixes have to go through the FAA, which can be difficult, bureaucratic and very expensive.

Well yes of course they have to be checked by a regulator, but you should still have the thought of, we must do this, no matter the cost as safety matters above everything else in this industry.

> you should still have the thought of, we must do this, no matter the cost as safety matters above everything else in this industry.

This premise implies that if you could prevent one plane crash for $10 trillion dollars then you should do it, but then ordinary people wouldn't be able to afford air travel. In reality they do have to consider the cost and then do the things that are justified based on the cost and the risk. Which means that high regulatory costs compromise safety because the more it costs to make a change that improves safety, the fewer of those changes can be implemented for an amount of money that can be justified by the risk.

> no matter the cost

Means nobody can fly. The FAA does understand this, but the mass media does not.

A 100% safe airplane won't move an inch, let alone fly at 30,000 feet.

This is a real problem with the current FAA setup. The limited amount of legal liability seems like a major problem, even switching from 200k euros to 2 million or 10 million euros as the max penalty per soul would add a minor amount of heft to lawsuits against the airlines and manufacturers.

The FAA and its international counterparts were created because airliners were constantly cutting corners or putting pressure on their pilot to do unsafe things.

Separating "regulators" and "manufacturers" in such distinct categories is overly simplistic, I'm afraid. As we saw with the whole Boeing debacle, the manufacturers are the experts on what they build, and we expect them to give clear, levelheaded, and honest guidance to operators and regulators. That also means they must have some responsibility for the outcomes of that guidance.

Having a separate regulator, which does no building themselves, somehow maintain a separate team of independent experts is a fools errand. We should of course have independent evaluators, but the people building the thing are the experts on the thing.

It's a challenging problem. Going back to when I was in aerospace even just with the FAA we had FAA west and FAA east, and they were treated as different entities within our company because they had such different approaches/understanding and then the EASA which was from our experience a protectionist entity that would look for gotchas on American competitors and not a neutral safety focused party and refused to recognized treaty obligated acceptance of FAA certification (and it was a big issue that the US refused to step in on our behalf and require the treaty be followed because the US authorities put safety first even though the US had agreed we were safe and had demonstrated it).

> Having a separate regulator, which does no building themselves, somehow maintain a separate team of independent experts is a fools errand. We should of course have independent evaluators, but the people building the thing are the experts on the thing.

Well they have to. Boeing showed what happens if they are not experts and they leave everything to the manufacturer. They'll just lie and scheme and even get away with it.

The manufacturers literally write the manual. The regulators only approve or reject it. And yes, EASA approved it too.

As much as I understand the culture of blameless post-mortems and the fact that people in that cockpit don't get the benefit of hindsight, maybe those other companies didn't have an accident because they followed procedure (which was a simple one)

Yes there were UX factors. Yes training could be better. Yes distractions happen

But if I'm going to blame the companies I'm going to blame them on putting someone inexperienced and probably who did not have the right mindset in navigating the profession. And meanwhile companies waste time in making automations on top of manual processes that make things even more complicated

>There were other near accidents before due to the exact same problem, the problem was well understood, and the changes needed to solve it was known.

Could you be more specific here? The article doesn't even say which problem Airbus are considered to be criminally liable for.

The plane was prone to lose its airspeed sensors on some weather conditions.

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