American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died
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I was always impressed by how seriously they took their jobs and how they were quick to tell anyone that they knew people's live could be at stake. The complexity of the work made experienced and long career hands absolutely necessary. The gravity of the job always weighs heavy on new hires and the help they received can't be measured. The online and classroom training that all receive during the length of their careers is extensive.
In all the many different trades at the base, two jokes were always told and I guarantee they're still being told today: Classroom training taught me how to drink coffee. And they wouldn't fly on AA because they knew the guys who worked on the planes. (The first one is absolutely true. The second was is not, especially after the company started flying to New Zealand!)
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/afacwa/pages/687/attac... (page 318)
One thing that can't be codified in procedures is what I call "situational awareness" for lack of a better term. I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable. In my organization, the older engineers have a sixth sense for projects that are going to be cancelled.
There's a reason why older drivers (up to a point of course) pay less for car insurance, yet the rules are the same for all of us.
This strikes me as something one learns very slowly over time. Safety takes time to internalize after close calls or seeing people get hurt. Same with complexity, it takes going through project after project to get a gut feeling for what works and what doesn't.
Rule #1 - never go if you can’t see.
And apples are oranges.
Sorry they are completely different traits. They can go hand in hand or support each other in certain individual, or they can manifest similarly, but its far from being a general rule.
Based on anecdotal evidence and experience, I absolutely believe that. Just a few weeks ago near me an elderly driver caused a crash that killed herself and a passenger in another car when she failed to follow a curve and drove head-on into opposing traffic on a road with a 40MPH speed limit.
Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a 777 doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated and republished to all maintenance crews worldwide.
It doesn't matter how well you document things there will always be tribal / personal knowledge.
Even if stuff is written down you have to know where to look.
[1]: "If you take something apart and put it back together again enough times, eventually you have two if it."
It’s a great story, but I assure you there is a pretty high percentage of airplanes flying with missing parts and systems placarded as INOP in both military and civilian aviation.
To reiterate, you CANNOT fly an airplane with an undocumented missing part. If the part is documented in the logbook as removed, and it is acceptable to fly that way, then it is not missing.
I have been building and maintaining commercial aircraft for a living for 30 years. What is your experience?
Because you asked, I’ve been flying, owning, and overseeing the maintenance of our aircraft for 27 years, including understanding my freedoms and obligations as a pilot and as an operator with regards to the legality of dispatch for imperfect aircraft under both normal operations and under special flight (aka “ferry”) permits. I have spent a lot of time across those three decades both socially and in continuing education courses/seminars with both GA and commercial flight crews and A&P/IAs.
There were posters everywhere about "extra parts" they called FOD.
It stands for foreign object debris, and means any physical thing out of place where it may cause damage or injury. Because of the nature of jet engines, basically anything can be FOD depending on where you put it.
What's being ignored is the 1/100 of these stories where this judgement pays off, saves aircraft and lives that make the other 99 worth while.
That's one of the things I love about AI: It's excellent at figuring out where to look, because it can digest so many documents so much faster than a person.
It’s more true in aviation than anywhere else (except maybe space flight), but still.
It takes also many years of study before they will let you touch any living person with your scalpel, and then many years of apprenticeship with actual surgeons when you do touch people with your tools.
I can imagine maintaining a big jumbo jet also requires some specialized practical knowledge you cannot acquire just by reading books and looking at nice little videos.
The problem is not to explain things when everything works perfectly. The problem is getting the ability to diagnose the root causes of defects using all your senses and your intuition. That is not taught in books.
I’ve only been to London once, for work. One of the coolest things I did when I was there was to take a black London cab from the financial district to Heathrow when I was leaving. It was probably a 30 minute drive. The driver had been driving a cab since 1982. He told me all about the requirements and training for being a cab driver and a bunch of other things that I did not know (for example, they own the cars, and they can choose when they work). He was also a wealth of information about London, as you can imagine, and pointed out lots of interesting things as we drove.
It was probably a $50 cab ride, but worth every penny (even though it wasn’t my money since it was a work trip).
Augmented reality glasses, coupled with an AI that can interpret vision would seem to be useful here then.
There needs to be SOME accountability. "Oh, but my glasses told me to unscrew this bolt, I was just following orders." is not how I want the future to be.
I guess it would explain those small insignificant issues, however:
https://viewfromthewing.com/ntsb-report-confirms-the-unravel...
That doesn't apply to private hire vehicle drivers afaik.
Just making a point that everyone else’s job always seems simple from the outside.
Software engineering is unique in STEM in that it has nearly zero regulations. Nobody keeps anybody accountable for quality and there are never any legal consequences. No other STEM jobs is like that, usually there are thousand hoops to jump through to do anything non-standard, but in software there's nothing. You can literally go to prison for forging an aircraft maintenance log, but you can forge JIRA logs to your heart's content and never get prosecuted (at most your employer can sue you for damages but that's it).
A Jira log is not part of a Quality Management System (QMS). An aircraft maintenance log is. If you fake data in the QMS, software or not, for a regulated industry, I can assure you that it won't be taken lightly by the regulators.
Try forging the software validation test records for that airplane's flight control system and see what happens.
Forging software validation records isn't illegal because you're forging documents regarding software, but because you're forging documents regarding an airplane. Nobody gives a flying fuck about forged records for software that isn't installed on any airplane. It's not the act of forging that's illegal, but the act of installing forged software on a real airplane. Unlike the airplane repair records, where forgery is a crime in and of itself even if the airplane never flies.
Ezpz
I guess a more relatable way of conveying this is that you can have the recipe from a michelin star chef, but you're still not going to get anywhere close to michelin star quality.
oh and post holes, some are easy and some you hit mystery chunks of concrete(!?). It was like archaeological expedition trying to get deep enough holes in the ground.
For quite a while, he hated having to test on real hardware because all sorts of failure modes that he couldn't predict: belts stretching, mechanisms hitting each other or not lining up properly and losing position, etc. kept happening and interfering with his nice "this will only take 15 minutes to test" estimates, making it an all-afternoon affair.
OTOH, it was that unpredictability and having to deal with weird stuff that I liked about programming embedded systems.
I hope you're right :) You probably are too. But even with that, there is a reason it's a profession and not something we ask gig-workers to do, it takes expertise and skill like any other skilled work, even though all the literal actions one might take is technically written down somewhere. Even in such industries, experts would get "hunches" about what is wrong, and are able to quicker pinpoint issues, and similar things. Or "getting a bad feeling" before something is actually evidentially bad, which prevented human disaster more than once in history.
I think if you consider that the job couldn't be done by just anybody who can read and follow instructions, then it might not be as easy as just "follow what the manuals say" and in those cases expertise, knowledge and experience matters a great deal.
Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose.
How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently? You could explain the principles and general ideas, but the apprentice is going to need to get scraped up a bit before they actually learn anything that matters. The apprentice willing to suffer repeated failure is where most of the heavy lifting occurs. The master is mostly a backstop to keep the apprentice alive.
Worse is that they who have the knowledge don't realise that others don't know what they know, it's completely automatic and ingrained to the owner.
It's unclear whether these sort of players will do as good a job at handing down their knowledge though. Think about how little you remember, in much detail at least, about stuff before you were 12 - and now imagine you were already master strength by then, let alone a grandmaster. I'm a later starter and can still vividly remember when I barely knew how the pieces moved, and I think that gives me a huge edge over most players in terms of teaching.
> The Rule of Two did away with Sith Academies. From your very first steps into the Dark Side, you work with your Master and only your Master. You are not responsible to other Dark Side users. You are not expected to delve into the secrets of the Dark Side and give that knowledge to Force-users other than your Master (or hide it from him). You're expected to do what you can to keep other potential Force-wielders from usurping your position, including kill them. You're expected to learn what your Master teaches you, but also to hide from him in order to overtake him.
Ideally your real-life experience with apprenticeship has been/will be slightly different than this!
You don't. You put these people together for some years to work on stuff together, and a small percentage of this "intangible" feelings, knowledge and experiences you cannot write down somehow magically passes over to the other person.
Of course, the apprentice will still require their own repeated failures and uphill battle even getting close, but having someone who mastered the craft near you as you go through this, makes the whole process a hell of a lot faster.
The amount of tacit knowledge I am applying to the architecture of my projects is probably too deep for LLMs to even approach, IMO. It takes very little to have Opus or even Fable make a mess that is obviously bad to anyone who understand even the first thing about effective software architecture.
Your bicycle case is a great example. People don't learn to ride a bike from a book. They receive in-person instruction of exactly the type the comment you're responding to was writing about.
To relate this back to the comment thread, people don't even always know the full extent of what they have learned.
Generally speaking (only a Sith deals in absolutes), engineers want to engineer.
There is no incentive for management to nudge the best performing engineers to teach their expertise in their craft[s]. A high-performing engineer "reflects good" on a manger. The way incentives are generally structured, this becomes a problem that perpetuates itself: Everyone in the management pipeline gets more money for the high performing engineer to keep engineering, rather than to teach.
The point of hiring someone specifically to do this is that he might simply want to keep on working, uninterrupted by apprentices or other demands, so the recorder must be a second person dedicated to knowledge maintenance.
This is, pardon the cliche, the exact type of “outside of the box” thinking that is completely impossible in shareholder-driven (or PE-driven) corporate America.
More and more I believe that we associate people with great ideas not because they were exceptionally capable of great thought, but because they managed to impose their ideas upon others through force of will, political chicanery, and sorcery.
When he passed away, his wife rented the shop out, to a drug addict who pawned off all the tools he could sneak out in his car.... when there was eventually an auction, not much was left, but I did at least get to buy an (empty) toolbox he had had me assemble from scrap lumber (which I still have on my workbench as a remembrance).
That said, for a flip side look at this sort of thing, consider the case of Charles Babbage trying to get his Analytical Engine made and the dispute over who owned the tooling, him or Joseph Clement, with the latter winning because at the time, a workman owned his tools, even if they were specifically constructed for a customer's project.
It is only because we know and can compare that we judge.
Remember, when we were hunter & gatherers, before becoming bound to the land and tilling that land, we had different gifts and talents that have all been lost. For better or worse.
Or closer to home: barely anyone remembers black and white television or the feeling it must have been to view the moon landing on one.[1] Cathode ray TVs have gone the way of the Dodos - good or bad? Who knows.
Whether a long term or short term outlook is better or worse, no one can tell because there aren't any goals nor targets to meet in evolution.
I feel like some "old" people have the weird idea that "young" people are just clueless about anything older than themselves. Just because some technology is no longer in use, does not mean that you don't get in touch with it. You don't grow up in isolation. There are always museums and of course the appliances of your parents and grandparents, in this case their photos.
All the films beyond some point are black and white and it's not like there were no significant events during that time. (Although I have seen some color-pictures from the 1900s, but the majority of course wasn't.)
Sure, you only use the technology from the past 15-20 years in daily life, but I feel like the technology you get in touch with is more closer to 80-100 years.
The feeling of B/W TVs being the bees-knees is not something anyone of us can experience simply because our expectations have been "influenced" by colour devices. Those that experienced those moment of absolute amazement will have a different appreciation for technology, simply because of that experience.
The same goes with "master craftsman", everyone will know of the concept but to have experienced it and learnt with a master craftsperson is completely different. Just because I know of something does not mean that I understand what it is like to interact with that something. And that has nothing to do with "old" or "young", that's just how life is.
What is truly like to have watched the moon landing on a B/W TV in a world where no one had a mini-supercomputer in their pocket. Or an internet connection providing more information and knowledge than the library down the road. I can't experience that moment, no matter how many devices I remove from my life - my experiences and expectations have already been too influenced by my previous experiences.
Also the BBC still issue black and white TV licences, I suspect my phone is eligible for one! Still about 3.5k of them working apparently.
So when two teams play, one in their light and the other in their dark jersey. Hence also stripes are important.
Gotta ensure backward compatibility!
Apollo 11 landed in 1969. Roughly a third of living Americans are of an age to remember watching it, and more than half of them would have done so on black and white TVs. (Color TV's didn't pass 50% of sales & ownership until 1972.)
Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the people.
What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies?
The math is simple and they teach it in every business school in the country.
People also lend money and invest in equities like index funds to plan for decades.
You cannot eat real estate or stock options, the medical industry is a drag on us all though obviously you can cherry pick examples where things don't look perverse.
The things they create (and not exclusively they, obviously the country as a whole creates too) directly lead to the share price increases and dividends that allow many or most people in the US to maintain purchasing power.
When you look at indoor square footage per capita (so like include the average HNer's share of the Starbucks and Whole Foods they patronize) and square footage and compare that to unit development trends and look at the costs it looks like we're just building bigger boxes rather than more of them. Basically the same story of the winners carrying the average that you see in every other market segment. Real estate development is probably one of the best market segments that illustrates the "K shaped economy".
Likewise with medical. It's probably a fools errand to try and figure out whether wiping the elderly's asses is over sold or drugs are over sold and both sides claim they're creating Real Value (TM) and making people's lives better but when you zoom out and look at how much we pay for all that it's clear that something is very wrong and it's a monetary drag on us that prevents us from being to spend our money on hookers and blow and Big Macs (or whatever it is that we want to spend out money on).
I didn't mention the tech industry in my quip because it makes things people elect to use voluntarily (to an extent, try not having an email these days) rather than structures itself to essentially compel more money to be spent within it like the industries within real estate development and medical do.
>Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
Of course we can apply the laws of physics and the theories of maths onto everything we see and experience around us but does that make them so - those experiences.
> What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies? Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
Take a more holistic view, what happened to all the stars and galaxies?[1]
The spiritual acceptance of the inevitable end of everything isn't taught in any business school and we are left to face/cope with that ourselves. If maths/business is your poison for coping, then so be it. I dislike reducing every experience to numbers and graphs, profit margins, win/loss and them/us.
I guess I'm trying to say is that even the biggest profit will have no longevity when compared to, even just human history, let alone the history of the universe.
[1] https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer?ra=229.6352&dec=2.0739&l...
The leading of companies with people not actually skilled at the craft is still a historic anomaly.
Would we have nearly as many slime-balls scheming up ways to plaster ads upon everyone's eyeballs and record our every movement and click if not for the money in it? At a societal level almost nothing ever gets done at scale if there isn't money in it. You remove the financial incentive and things atrophy, new investment stops replacing old, etc.
I respect people who can do it, who can live a simple life doing the same thing every single day and be happy about it. Sometimes I wish I had that ability. But it is very much _not_ me.
Then I caught myself thinking the same way about the fisherman that lives next door, who I pass every day and he sits and does something with his fishing nets. To me, it all looks the same way, so I asked myself how he can sit every day doing the same thing, over and over again. Asking him about it, apparently it's not so "the same" every day to him, as depending on the expected weather and what not, he prepares the net differently, and sometimes tries new things for various reasons. Maybe he is bored after all these years, I never asked, but I learned not to assume at least that things might look the same from the outside, but the person might be having a completely different perspective on it.
Like a taxi driver, it's just "driving all day" right? For a lot of people, seemingly this brings them a "no day is ever the same" experience and they love it and don't see any repetition, at least lots of drivers I've talked to felt this way.
See: https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...
Every single possible airplane maintenance operation is detailed on task cards that mechanics follow. Probably there is some small amount of tribal knowledge, but virtually everything is documented with step-by-step procedures, which includes the tools you need, every step, all torque values, etc.
It’s not like being an electrician or pipefitter where you have to make your pipe or conduit get from point A to point B by following the construction code, airplane safety is crucial enough that documenting and standardizing airplane maintenance was done long ago.
Some mechanics are just good mechanics, and that's okay.
I remember posting on PM about 15 years ago asking how to fix a mistake I kept making and he gently smacked me on the head and basically said just learn to do it right in the first place. Which was really the only good answer!
> He’s the guy who sits with the new kids at lunch and passes it on.
Hopefully you are apprenticing many junior engineers!
Vote republicans out so we can restore the 1950s tax rates and financial regs that prevented CEOs fron cutting wages and outsourcing to make themselves personally richer. CEOs pay nothing for their stock, it is given them for free. Then they take tax free loans on the stock and that allows them to bubble the stock price for tax free loan money. CEOs self enrich off of a cycle of bubbles and pops.
It's because management didn't value it. They put the veteran on on more jobs rather on moving them to training, because short term it's more profitable, and mid term it's easier to poach veterans off competition rather than train them in house
Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.
Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.
The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.
just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.
You can hover over the "hours ago" link and the timestamp does not match the title.
Why is the timestamp of my comment (and many others) of this post manipulated? Was this post recently merged with another duplicate?
Interesting you've been here at least since then and haven't noticed it before, happens relatively often, dare I say at least once a day?
I'm guessing HN either by choice or by accident shows the "original timestamp" in that title attribute, while the user-facing rendering shows the newly bumped timestamp.
Azriel: All mighty servant of Yahweh. He who cleaves soul from body, angel of death. Archangel.