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Comment by jatora | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty clear they're laying out that this is pilot error, unlike the article's intent to blame parties other than the pilot. The poster is trying to correct that, from an obvious place of knowledge and experience most of us do not have, and isn't being rude about it either.

It's important to understand why things happen in order to prevent them, and to counter the narrative of the opinionated article. And if we should wait for the NTSB report, then so should the article.

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More than one thing can be true. Flying into the side of a mountain is an error by the pilot (obviously). It can also be true that if GPS wasn't being jammed it wouldn't have happened.

To bring it full circle, it can also be true that it wouldn't have happened to a more competent pilot under the same circumstances. Per the parent commenter's point, it doesn't hurt anything to bring that perspective.

That is probably true but I also think it's unfair to blame the pilot. This was a last minute flight to a small airport for a medevac. It's easy to say that as pilot it's ultimately their responsibility to make a safe flight. It's quite another to let someone die because you're worried about making an unfamiliar night flight without Gps.

“If X was different then Y wouldn’t have happened” is a useless way to evaluate things that leads one to blame a butterfly flapping its wings for causing a hurricane.

Not useless if you can identify and stop the butterflies that cause hurricanes.

The point is that they don’t cause hurricanes, despite the fact that some hurricanes might not have happened if not for the flapping.

I can point to at least one fatal crash that wouldn’t have happened if GPS was unavailable. Would it be reasonable to say that crash was caused by a lack of GPS jamming?

If I know stopping a particular butterfly from flapping its wings prevents thousands of people from dying and devastating effects on infrastructure (the typical result of a hurricane) I don't particularly care if they "cause" hurricanes I'm still stopping it. Philosophers can debate the meaning of the word "cause" all they want but it really isn't relevant.

That "if" is the critical thing. There's no way to know that in advance, not even probabilistically. If you try to stop prevent deaths in this way, you'll just waste your time, and you might even produce more deaths rather than fewer.

Something like GPS jamming isn't quite so bad. It's intuitively reasonable that reducing or degrading the information available to pilots will make things worse, and avoiding that is likely to improve safety. But it requires proper analysis to figure out the best thing to do, not a simplistic "this specific event wouldn't have happened if this specific fact had been different." That's what "cause" is about in a practical sense: not "what changes would have avoided this past event?" but "what changes improve our odds in the future?" And the first question isn't nearly enough to answer the second.

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