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ak86

64 karma · joined March 24, 2009

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ak86··on Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes
I'd say that's a clickbait title. The actual report is at: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/..., and framing it as a recommendation to change the test procedure to use 'average' pilots seems like a big liberty.

To me, the thrust of the article is on making sure human factors are incorporated into flight certification process. As they highlight, although uncommanded MCAS input was part of the certification tests, it was only marked as a 'major' risk rather than more severe classifiers. This wasn't because of any phenomenal test pilots, but just because the FAA (rather than Boeing) guidelines behind the certification assume immediate assessment and diagnosis of the issue.

The report goes into a lot of depth about other human factors, for example, how transport-category planes should have straightforward highlighting of the primary issue since often the primary cause bubbles through various interconnected systems, and the main pilot response tends to be to identify the root cause under stress and then having to fix it.

To the extent I could re-summarize the report, I'd say "Plane Certification Processes Must Consider Real-World Scenarios And Factor Human Response to In-Flight Failures in Plane Design"

ak86··on Why I Wrote PGP (1999)
I was just starting out with PGP today - and found iPGMail to be useful on iOS.
ak86··on The Anorexic Startup: A Tale of Sex, Drugs, and C++
Shouldn't it be "A Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Objective-C"?
ak86··on Pinterest quietly modifying users links to generate affiliate revenue
Yup, Stack Overflow does do that: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/26964/auto-inserting... and http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising...
ak86··on Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?
Yep. http://blog.pluckytree.org/post/12223068604/the-last-time-i-...
ak86··on Dilbert on 'FU Money'
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/thatlost4gphone/ would indicate that Scott Adams works with a buffer of almost 2 months.