Comment by fsckboy

Or a Tesla. I've done this exact thing, although the car just beeped at me and refused to go into reverse, of course.

But if he did, would have done hours of retraining in a simulator?

Or even crazier, a manual shift on the steering column. Nothing weirder than pushing down the clutch and then changing the gear with your hand on a knob off to the side of the steering wheel.

> I suspect you've never driven an older vehicle with the shifter on the steering column.

Or a new Mercedes ;)

The pilot wasn’t flying an unfamiliar aircraft.

But the 787 doesn’t have an easily confused layout like that. The landing gear lever and fuel cut off switches are not two stalks on the yoke. Aircraft cockpits are deliberately designed in such a way that important things have differently shaped actuators that feel different from each other. Precisely so that you are not accidentally flipping the wrong switch by accident.

> If hearing those guesses annoys you, nobody is forcing you to read through comments on a thread of people making them!

It’d be nice if we could only read insightful comments, and unread the wacko comments, but we can’t. This discussion has actually provided a lot of useful comments from people who seem to know what they’re talking about, but also a lot of really wild speculation.

Idle speculation is far from the only thing you won't find me supporting just because it's human nature. Thankfully, HN comment threads tend to include a lot more than just that kind of discussion, which is why I read them. Indeed there are lots of great details I didn't glean or fully understand in the report covered in the comments.

That doesn't mean I will always agree with the comments (or that everyone will always agree with mine) and that's okay. It'd be a very limited value discussion if we could only ever comment when we agree. It seems exceedingly unlikely any of this has something to do with users being forced to be here though.

They are a forum moderator and therefore it is part of their job, it is nice that you apologised.

I don't think it's fair to say that pilot error is confirmed yet. It seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but what if the electronics glitched out and acted as though the cutoff switches had been flipped (the first time), even if they hadn't? All of the currently-disclosed facts still line up with that scenario IMO.

That's just your brain associating the bathroom with the act of brushing your teeth, and therefore doing it automatically upon the trigger of entering the bathroom. It bears no resemblance to the accidental activation of a completely different button.

The other poster's correction: "it’s like brushing your teeth with razor" is apt. Touching the fuel cutoff switches is not part of any procedure remotely relevant to the takeoff, so there's no trigger present that would prompt the automatic behavior.

If someone confused their steering wheel for the brake you'd probably be surprised - there are indeed errors that are essentially impossible for a competent person to make by mistake. No idea about the plane controls, though.

Technically an overstatement but not by much. Correctly restated, its highly unlikely these actions were confusing pilots. It's as if you mistook flushing your toilet twice when instead you wanted to turn on the lights in your bathroom.

If I were to apply OPs assertion to your actions it’s like brushing your teeth with razor. I guess that’s what they meant.

Even humans have fixed action patterns. Much behavior is barely under conscious control.

this bathroom thing and various similar scenarios happens to me when im on weed.

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Yep, I’ve taken clean dishes from the dishwasher and put them “away” in the refrigerator.

As I get older, I do some similar stuff, way more than past, even it is just once per month. And I guess way more when sugar is high than not. Don't know your age or medical profile and I am not a doctor, just keep an eye.

Because there's no difference in actions needed to do so. A similar mistake is throwing away a useful item while holding onto a piece of trash. The action is the same, it's just the item in question that's different.

This is not what happened here at all. The actions needed to activate the fuel cutoff switches are not similar to any other action a pilot would want to make during takeoff.

Probably time to design a plane that can't be sent into terrain in seconds by flipping a switch.

Those are caused by operating the same lever in a slightly different manner. Not comparable to two completely differently designed levers placed far apart.

Same goes for accidental acceleration instead of braking. Two of the same kind of lever right next to each other.

Accidental acceleration while intending to turn on the wipers would be a fitting example, I don't think that happens though.

Driving isn't trained to anywhere near the same standard.

Probably more training required to bake a cake than drive a car (hours wise).

If we had your typical driver fly a plane we'd be doomed to a lot of crashes.

This isn’t true. This was a 787. It does not use a separate recorder for voice and data (CVR, FDR).

(Most media outlets also got this wrong and were slow to make corrections. )

Rather, it uses a EAFR (Enhanced airborne flight recorder) which basically combines the functions. They’re also more advanced than older systems and can record for longer. The 787 has two of them - the forward one has its own power supply too.

There should be video as well, but I’m not sure what was recovered. Not necessarily part of the flight data recording, but there are other video systems.

https://www.geaerospace.com/sites/default/files/enhanced-air...

In the US, the NTSB has been recommending it for over 20 years. The pilot unions have been blocking it, due to privacy and other things.

I'm not in aviation. But my between-the-lines straightforward reading is that unions see it as something with downsides (legal liability) but not much upside. It could be that there are a million tiny regulations that are known by everyone to be nonsensical, perhaps contradictory or just not in line with reality and it's basically impossible to be impeccably perfect if HD high fps video observation is done on them 24/7. Think about your own job and your boss's job or your home renovation work etc.

Theoretically they could say, ok, but the footage can only be used in case the plane crashes or something serious happens. Can't use it to detect minor deviations in the tiniest details. But we know that once the camera is there, there will be a push to scrutinize it all the time for everything. Next time there will be AI monitoring systems that check for alertness. Next time it will be checking for "psychological issues". Next time they will record and store it all and then when something happens, they will in hindsight point out some moment and sue the airline for not detecting that psychological cue and ban the pilot. It's a mess. If there's no footage, there's no such mess.

The truth is, you can't bring down the danger from human factors to absolute zero. It's exceedingly rare to have sabotage. In every human interaction, this can happen. The answer cannot be 24/7 full-blown totalitarian surveillance state on everyone. You'd have to prove that the danger from pilot is bigger than from any other occupation group. Should we also put bodycam on all medical doctors and record all surgeries and all interactions? It would help with malpractice cases. How about all teachers in school? To prevent child abuse. Etc. Etc.

Regulation is always in balance and in context of evidence possibilities and jurisprudence "reasonableness". If the interpretation is always to the letter and there is perfect surveillance, you need to adjust the rules to be actually realistic. If observation is hard and courts use common sense, rules can be more strict and stupid because "it looks good on paper".

You also have to think about potential abuses of footage. It would be an avenue for aircraft manufacturers, airlines, FAA, etc to push more blame on the pilots, because their side becomes more provable but the manufacturing side is not as much. You could then mandate camera video evidence for every maintenance task like with door plugs.

I wonder how the introduction of police body cam footage changed regulations of how police has to act. Along the lines of "hm, stuff on this footage is technically illegal but is clearly necessary, let's update the rules".

Not sure why something so important isn't included.

Heck they can make a back up directly to the cloud in addition to black box considering I'm able to watch YouTube in some flights nowadays.

Respectfully, it's not up to other people to disprove your toy theory. The question you're asking here can very easily be answered with a quick Google search.

The short answer is that they are _very_ different controls, that looks and operate in a completely different way, located in a different place, and it's completely unrealistic to think a pilot could have mistaken one for the other.

God knows the number of times I confused my num lock key for my caps lock key, they are both keys after all!

The landing great lever is shaped like a wheel as a design affordance. It would be VERY hard to confuse

No, no, and no.

Different controls with different t shapes, operated in different ways, of different number, different size, and very different positions. One is down almost on the floor, and well rearward, the other is at stomach height and well forward.

The fuel cutoffs also require pulling the control out and over a guard.

If you read through the boeing procedures, if an engine fails just after take off you delay cutting throttle or hitting the cutoff until you have positive climb and pass a certain altitude. Specifically because a mistake here would be so incredibly catastrophic. The following number of steps and verbal cross checks for then shutting down the engine are quite daunting. Not something applicable here, but still interesting to learn about

Would it matter in this case since you would crash either ways. I’m talking about protection in a very specific situation where you make it harder to shut off both engines when you’re very close to the ground.

I don't think the theory is that the muscle memory sequences resemble each other.

Instead, it's that because muscle memory allows you to do things without thinking about it, you can get mixed up about which action you meant to perform and go through the whole process without realizing it.

Would anyone be surprised if an accomplished concert pianist played C Bb Bb instead of C E in a piece they had played thousands of times correctly?

The only difference here is that the consequences are death instead of mere head shaking.

Murder needs more proof than just performing the wrong action. Until then we should apply Hanlon's Razor.

i have several passwords i type all the time. sometimes i get them confused and type the wrong one to the wrong prompt. i type them by muscle memory, but i also think about them while typing and i think thoughts like "time to reach up and to the left on the keyboard for this password". I couldn't tell you the letter i'm trying to type, i just know to do that.

not all my passwords are up and to the left, some are down and to the right, but when i type the wrong one into the wrong place, i type it accurately, i'm just not supposed to be typing it.

"time to do that thing i've practiced, reach to the left". shuts two engines off by muscle memory.

Sometimes I drive all the way home without being aware of what I did in between.