Comment by zamadatix
1 day ago
One of the nice things about finally having the preliminary report is I get to stop hearing all of the same assumptions/theories/YouTuber said/"a guy I know got a leaked report"/etc in water cooler talk at work because the preliminary report solidly disproved all of them so far. If anyone even had and stuck with an idea matching this report it wouldn't have stood out in the conversations anyways.
The collection of comments on this post remind me it'll just be a brand new set of random guesses until the final report is released. Or worse - the final report reaches no further conclusions and it just has to fade out of interest naturally over time.
It's human nature to want to guess at possible explanations for things that are unusual and unexpected.
If hearing those guesses annoys you, nobody is forcing you to read through comments on a thread of people making them! (I hope - sorry if you are being forced after all.)
> 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 believe that's the case? Though happy to be proven wrong. Unless perhaps you mean a moderator of a different forum, though that wouldn't really be relevant to their reading a thread of HN comments on a subject that annoys them.
1 reply →
> I get to stop hearing all of the same assumptions/theories/YouTuber said/"a guy I know got a leaked report"/etc in water cooler talk
This was a really disappointing incident for aviation YouTube - I unsubscribed from at least three different channels because of their clickbait videos and speculation.
Double engine failure was confirmed, not disproven. RAT deployment was confirmed, not disproved. Pilot error, confirmed, not disproven. Preliminary and final aviation reports are mostly guesses.
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.
Even as a matter of safety/investigation hygiene, "pilot error" should be the conclusion of last resort, arrived at after months of poring over data, and because nothing else seems viable.
If we decided to pin all aviation incidents on pilot errors, we wouldn't even have invented checklists (what do you mean you forgot, try harder the next time).
"Natural" pilot errors lead to lessons that can be incorporated into design/best practices. That does not seem to be the case given current understanding: no flaw in any switch design seems apparent, and it does not sound like something you could do by accident.
So "pilot error" is not the "cracking the case"-grade conclusion it is being made out to be, it is an act of investigative resignation. In the days following the crash, allegations of mixing up flaps and landing gear were floated, and they all turned out to be wrong. This is not even accounting for the fact that the pilots are not around to plead their case, and basic human dignity requires us to defend their case until evidence clearly points a certain way