Air Controllers Lose Contact With Air Algérie Plane | Hacker News Reader

Air Controllers Lose Contact With Air Algérie Plane

nytimes.com

It's now being reported the plane has been confirmed as crashing:

> Algerian television station Elnahar confirmed the plane went down due to bad weather and an Algerian aviation official had told Reuters flight AH5017 had crashed. The plane crashed after passing the capital of Niger and it is presumed all 116 people on board have been killed. The flight was said to have been found near Niamey, the capital of Niger.

Source: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/breaking-air-algerie-flight-ah5017-...

The MD-80 was wet-leased from Swift Air[1]. A wet lease basically means that you not only lease the aircraft, but also the crew, maintenance, insurance, etc[2]. It's basically a turnkey way to add capacity.

Because all of the operational responsibilities really belong to Swift Air (with Air Algérie basically only responsible for footing the bills for fuel and airport fees), it will be interesting to see which airline gets the most backlash for the incident. (Of course, Air Algérie is at least partially responsible in the sense that it may have put its passengers on a flight operated by a unsafe contractor)

[1]http://web.archive.org/web/20140724115952/http://www.flightg...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_lease#Wet_lease

Choose your submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8079655

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8079401

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8079109

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8079069

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8078899

Or find one of your own - these aren't all of them.

Well it does come down to submitting interesting current news stories when more readers are likely to be awake and online.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

    If they'd cover it on TV news,
    it's probably off-topic.

I suspect, in part, this is why. Something like this is regarded as news-worthy, so suddenly there's a dozen submissions. It's not specific to hackers or hacking in any way at all. Yes, it's of general interest, but perhaps HN should be limited to things of interest to hackers, and of less interest to the wider public.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com