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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> But consider for a moment the year 1985, one of the darkest ever for commercial air travel. By the end of that year, 27 crashes had resulted in the deaths of almost 2,400 people. These included the Air India bombing over the North Atlantic, with 329 casualties, and, two months later, the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123 outside Tokyo, with 520 dead. (These, the second- and fifth-deadliest incidents in aviation history, happened 49 days apart.) Also in 1985 were the Arrow Air disaster in Newfoundland that killed more than 240 U.S. servicemen, the infamous British Airtours 737 fire, and the crash of a Delta Air Lines L-1011 in Dallas that killed 137.

Wow, the number of fatalities that year is incomprehensible by today's standards. Yes, this accident has made big news because so few accidents have happened in this decade...but I'd say that today's news cycle has served to amplify just about everything, no matter what their statistical, relative, or absolute significance.

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There are still quite a lot of bigger accidents, but since they happen in Africa and Asia, they're not that big news in the West.

For example, 2012: * April 20 – Bhoja Air Flight 213, a Boeing 737, crashes near Chaklala airbase, Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan reportedly due to bad weather, killing all of the 127 passengers and crew on board. * May 9 – In the Mount Salak Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash, a Sukhoi Superjet 100 crashes into Mount Salak, Indonesia on an exhibition flight, killing all 45 passengers and crew on board. * June 3 – Dana Air Flight 992, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 carrying 146 passengers and 7 crew members crashes in a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria on approach to Murtala Muhammed International Airport, killing all on board and an estimated 6 more people on the ground.

Of course, air safety has been greatly improved, but it's not like these larger accidents are unheard of.

> Yes, this accident has made big news because so few accidents have happened in this decade...

And there is video footage of it happening. Never underestimate the how much excitement there is in news rooms where there is actually video of the news that isn't just people talking.

Yes the news cycle amplifies everything but when they have video the volume goes to 11 (or beyond)!

So true. There was another plane crash that killed ten people in Alaska over the weekend...even though it was more deadly it hasn't gotten the same coverage, in some measure because there's no video of the accident.

I think the issue is that major airline crashes are so relatable since many people fly on a major carrier every so often. "It could've been me" plays. On the other hand, very, very few people take air taxis in Alaska.

So it's ok to forgive Pilots' incompetence just because statistics say it doesn't happen a lot?

This is orthogonal to the original argument, but yes, we should forgive pilot error, because mistakes are not necessarily a demonstration of incompetence.

Life, and all subcomponents of life, is one giant ball of probabilities. Training, preparation, and planning all go towards decreasing the probability of undesirable events, but they do not rule them out entirely.

This includes plane crashes, car crashes, or even scraping your knee.

Professional football players don't play perfectly every game. Olympic athletes still make mistakes despite years of daily training. And you still have major bugs in your codebase - would you describe yourself as incompetent?

Mistakes happen. Accidents happen. So long as we can confidently determine that it is accidental rather than systemic (i.e., incompetence), we learn from it and keep going.

But nevermind all that. Let's hang a sign around their necks, parade them in the streets, let people throw things at them, and then execute them publicly.

Perhaps more to the point, no single error should ever destroy an aircraft. As the parent points out, people make mistakes. This is not news, and good systems (including aircraft) are designed to allow for that. So, even if pilot error was a contributing factor, I find it very hard to believe that nothing else went wrong. There were at least two people in the cockpit as well as controllers on the ground. No one was worried until a few seconds before the crash.

Agree that a single, simple error has little chance to down a modern transport aircraft. It's almost always a chain of errors, each necessary but only jointly sufficient.

I realize that not all the facts are in, and the NTSB full process will take quite some time, but I believe that once all the facts are in, you will find this to be a stunning display of lack of basic airmanship skills.

Why would no one on the ground warn the flight? The altitude transmitted to ATC radar is in hundred foot increments and the high and fast on initial won't trigger an alert, once they pull the power off and try to capture the appropriate vertical profile, ATC radar has no information that anything is wrong, then when they start blowing through the vertical profile, there's not enough resolution to trigger a low altitude alert.

More fundamentally perhaps, it's not ATC's job to fly the plane. ATC keeps planes separated; pilots fly them. On a clear-and-a-million day, and an 11,000 foot runway, the crew couldn't manage a visual approach. There was more than one error, but I think the NTSB findings on probable cause will overhwelminginly find the failures to be in the forward portion of the aircraft, immediately behind the yokes. (It is hard to fathom.)

Thankfully the NTSB and other accident investigators do not usually come out with a single easy cause in a newsbite size. They will examine lots of contributory factors, and they will come up with suggestions that fix those - typically dozens or more. In aviation they talk of "swiss cheese" theory - slices of cheese with holes in them. The idea is to have many in such a way as holes don't line up.

As you say, a failure like this is not "pilot error" but rather a failure of the aviation system and that is what needs to be corrected for all aviation. The "pilot error" is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

I don't believe that is even close to what he was saying.

This is about how we deal with the news, not how an airline should discipline pilots who screw up.

For everybody talking about pilot error, please note that none of us have full info. Just as another datapoint read this http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2357585/Crash-landin...

Same type of plane( yes different type of engines) , same type of issues while landing. I am not suggesting that sfo crash was due to engine failure. I am just suggesting that we all should wait for the investigation to conclude.

While we don't yet know the details, have enough information to say that 1) the approach was unstabilized, 2) the engines provided thrust when they initiated a go-around (too late), 3) no emergency was declared before the accident happened unlike the BA accident. The only thing in common with these two accidents is that they are the same model of airplane and that both landed short of the runway. We don't know whether it was pilot error, but it looks very unlikely to be the same problem, especially since Boeing reviewed all 777 aircraft after that accident. A third option of course is that the root cause was not found in the earlier investigation and that there is a different problem affecting the type, but so far pilot error seems to be the most likely cause.

It's not the same problem, as the engines responsed to thrust. The pilots applied thrust 8 seconds before impact, and the engines revved up to about 50% in that time.

Do we know if that is a reasonable rate of acceleration for a 777 engine?

It seems that regulations call for 6-7 secs from idle to full thrust.

1. http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-242588.html

Thank you, that's the kind of answer I was looking for.

Highly knowledgeable people have commented on it and not said it was anything unusual, so, yes, I'd say it's reasonable. Jet engines don't change their output on a dime.

>Highly knowledgeable people have commented on it and not said it was anything unusual, so, yes, I'd say it's reasonable.

You know, there's not a single thing about your comment that's useful.

>Jet engines don't change their output on a dime.

Yeah, I know. That's the reason for the question.

What's not useful about that? Experts commenting on their field of expertise don't count for anything, or what?

This specific item has been addressed by people who know this stuff. They didn't indicate it was abnormal. How is that not useful?

>Highly knowledgeable people

Who? You're some guy on the Internet. I should take it on faith that you can tell who is knowledgeable and who is a blowhard?

> have commented on it and not said it was anything unusual, so, yes, I'd say it's reasonable.

Again, instead of providing a fact I have to trust the judgment of a person I do not know.

> Jet engines don't change their output on a dime.

It should have been obvious from my question that I know that much about turbines. Do you have any information specific to 777 engines or something comparable?

>Experts commenting on their field of expertise don't count for anything, or what?

They might. It depends who they are. I don't always believe everything I see on television or the Internet. Sometimes I like to know their reasoning.

Why the hell are you posting on an internet forum if you're not interested in what "some guy on the internet" has to say?

That's exactly what I'm saying :)

>Boeing reviewed all 777 aircraft after that accident.

Boeing, the same company who months ago reviewed their 787 batteries and found no reason to ground their planes?

It's hardly "another datapoint" when it's armchair speculation by a tabloid journalist from an infamous scandal rag. Admittedly it's actually not that badly written, but for context his other article published that day features nightmarish visions of San Francisco under 25 feet of water...

The initial conclusions from the US National Transportation Safety Board is that the engines were functioning normally; i.e. a totally different issue while landing. I doubt a Seoul-San Francisco flight in mid-July was likely to have experienced the same unusually cold temperatures that resulted in the BA038 fuel droplets freezing (over Siberia in January) either

Is it OK to forgive the dozens of incompetent car drivers who kill people on a daily basis? And if not, how would you feel if each fatal accident was given such national news treatment (if there were enough bandwidth to do so, which, theoretically, there is)

My comment is not about the culpability of the pilots, but the long recognized psychological phenomenon of overestimating risk probabilities due to increased "hearing of" incidents, rare or not, the cause being irrelevant.

Because each driver is not responsible for 300 lives in their cars. That's why there is so much attention to plane crashes. It doesn't kill one person at a time.

Besides, it's incredible such an accident happen when the weather is perfect, there is no wind, it's not at night, the plane is working just fine, and it's just a couple of pilots who don't know what they are doing because they don't know how to land a plan manually since they are used to pressing buttons the whole time and relyong on autopilot. That's what the news is about.

Just like the AF447 crash between Rio and Paris: Pilots incompetence at its best.

Because each driver is not responsible for 300 lives in their cars. That's why there is so much attention to plane crashes. It doesn't kill one person at a time.

Right.. and this crash only killed 2 people. Perhaps one if the reports of the girl being hit by a rescue vehicle are believed; so what's your point? The real story is just how better aircraft safety has come over the years. This same accident years ago could very well have killed everyone aboard.

Just like the AF447 crash between Rio and Paris: Pilots incompetence at its best.

...and a week after this accident everyone was blaming the weird weather that happens at the equator for the crash. The point is that everyone is speculating, even you, that this this accident is the pilot's fault, but more often than not it's found to be a combination of mechanical failure and the pilot not being able to respond to it quickly enough -- which just so happens to be the official cause of AF447 crashing in 2009.

It's obvious they have been very lucky on the landing. It could have turned out in an explosion and kill half of the passengers. It doesn't excuse anything.

It certainly doesn't excuse your profound and distressing ignorance and belligerence. The facts are that you are not a pilot, were not there, have not received an official statement from the parties involved and are merely voicing an opinion based on what little information the mainstream press has been able to glean in the time since the accident.

Air disaster investigations typically take a while. Most reach conclusions that are extremely non obvious, nor intuitive. I recommend, for the sake of my own sanity and the rest of the people you inflict your opinion on, that you read the following books:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Air-Disaster-Vol-Macarthur-Job/dp/18...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/books/dp/1875671196

There is a third volume available as well if you can stick it out, but perhaps you may gain some much needed perspective.

Doctors make mistakes. Programemrs make mistakes. Pilots make mistakes.

In fact, if you can actually get an airline pilot in a relaxed situation where he's certain you won't rat him out, you'll hear lots of stories about stupid mistakes. The fact that this inevitable human error almost never results in fatalities is a testament to the level of redundancy in air traffic procedures.

As a case in point, I talked to a pilot in one of Europe's major low-price carriers. They had an incident where both pilots literally fell asleep in the cockpit and were intercepted by German jets. Apart from the jet fighter escorts, the passengers never knew anything was off.

Did you read this article? And if so, do you have any more well thought out arguments against that author's point? His whole point is that this type of landing is not uncommon and there is little reason at this point that it had anything to do with the pilot's experience. It's still possible, yes, but you're making statements that indicate you understand neither the article nor the comments to which your are responding. People are explaining why there is a media frenzy around the accident, not why it's okay. Trolling, at its best.

Yes, I have read the article, and this final statement is ignorance at its best: "Whatever happened on final approach into SFO, I highly doubt that it was anything related to the culture of Korean air safety in 2013. Plane crashes are increasingly rare the world over. But they will continue to happen from time to time, and no airline or country is 100 percent immune. "

There were clear indications from the communication with the air tower that the pilots did not communicate any emergency situation until 1.5 seconds before the crash, and that the co-pilot was apparently silent in the cockpit. Check the Los Angeles times article about that. It's clearly linked to cultural aspects, all over again.

I do not make this accusation lightly - but this strikes me as a particularly racist thing to say. Your argument boils down to "because the co-pilot was silent during the crash this points to deficiencies in Korean culture".

Which is a wild leap no matter which way you cut it.

But I mean, congrats I guess. You were looking for a conclusion and unsurprisingly you found it.

Here's an extract from a pilot's post who was instructing in Korea. Don't take my word for it, take his:

"The Koreans are very very bright and smart so I was puzzled by their inability to fly an airplane well. They would show up on Day 1 of training (an hour before the scheduled briefing time, in a 3-piece suit, and shined shoes) with the entire contents of the FCOM and Flight Manual totally memorized. But, putting that information to actual use was many times impossible. Crosswind landings are also an unsolvable puzzle for most of them. I never did figure it out completely, but I think I did uncover a few clues. Here is my best guess. First off, their educational system emphasizes ROTE memorization from the first day of school as little kids. As you know, that is the lowest form of learning and they act like robots. They are also taught to NEVER challenge authority and in spite of the flight training heavily emphasizing CRM/CLR, it still exists either on the surface or very subtly. You just cant change 3000 years of culture.

The other thing that I think plays an important role is the fact that there is virtually NO civil aircraft flying in Korea. Its actually illegal to own a Cessna-152 and just go learn to fly. Ultra-lights and Powered Hang Gliders are Ok. I guess they dont trust the people to not start WW III by flying 35 miles north of Inchon into North Korea. But, they dont get the kids who grew up flying (and thinking for themselves) and hanging around airports. They do recruit some kids from college and send then to the US or Australia and get them their tickets. Generally, I had better experience with them than with the ex-Military pilots. This was a surprise to me as I spent years as a Naval Aviator flying fighters after getting my private in light airplanes. I would get experienced F-4, F-5, F-15, and F-16 pilots who were actually terrible pilots if they had to hand fly the airplane. What a shock!"

The whole post : http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight-cras...

People, please read the whole linked post before passing judgement. It sounds highly believable, from someone who was teaching pilots in Korea very recently (2003-2008) and makes the claims of a fantastic turnaround success story sound mostly like a very ineffective re-education campaign that has failed in the face of an entrenched educational culture.

Where did i imply racism? Culture has not only to do with nationality, its also part of education, training, and skills when interacting with others. This kind of accidents can happen in all cockpits where there is no open critique and communication.

That's exactly what we had in the 80s, a deficient culture in the cockpit, a bunch of hot shot pilots who 'didn't want to be told what to do' and would ignore co-pilot advice. I'm not surprised another country has these same hurdles to overcome.

Sure, but that's not the part I had a problem with. Korean Air, after all, had an incident in the 90s where the captain overruled the strenuous objections of his copilot, resulting in a fatal crash.

The main issue I had with the post was that he's claiming this to be the case purely on the notion that the copilot did not speak during the crash. That's severely reaching, and smells a lot like fitting facts to a predetermined conclusion rather than the other way around.

But Korean Air at least, and Korean pilots have already faced that hurdle (if they aren't already the poster children for culture issues among pilots), and if it comes down to a cultural issue again I'll be more than a little surprised.

Can't find the link I originally saw that went into this in more detail, but the basic subject is covered here: http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2008/12/04/malcolm-gladwell-...

More on the business side here: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/new-standards-mea...

Prepare to be surprised:

http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight-cras...

That's exactly what I have been talking about and I was voted down to hell for claiming that out loud.

In my opinion, you were getting voted down to hell because you made very inflammatory remarks that had nothing to do with the parent comment. Somebody remarked on how the relative lack of airline disasters in recent history probably amplified the media frenzy this time around, and you said "So it's ok to forgive Pilots' incompetence just because statistics say it doesn't happen a lot?"

Don't play the martyr. If you had posted that link as an entirely separate comment and suggested that it was a major factor in the crash, no one would have down voted you, I'm sure. But because of that first comment that was, IMO, a huge jump in both tone and topic from its parent, people probably perceived your subsequent comments as being irrational and motivated by emotion. It was nothing to do with what you were talking about, and everything to do with how you were talking about it.

"plane is working just fine"

This you know how?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6013520 It certainly does not look like plane failure.

Pilots suggest plane slowed despite presence of auto-throttle: http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/10/us/asiana-airlines-crash/

My point is, it is premature to rule out aircraft problems.

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