Comment by WalterBright
2 days ago
> It's difficult to conclude anything other than murder-suicide.
Remember that incident where a cop pulled out his taser and tased the suspect? Except he pulled out his pistol and fired it.
The taser looks nothing like a pistol, feels nothing like it, yet it is still possible to confuse the two in the heat of the moment.
It’s always easy in those threads to see who’s familiar with the world of aviation and who’s not.
No it’s not comparable to a cop that confuses things in the heat of the moment. Not anywhere close to be relatable.
If it was, planes would be crashing down the sky quite often (and it would have been fixed for decades already).
WalterBright is not totally unfamiliar with the aviation world...:
> Bright is the son of the United States Air Force pilot Charles D. Bright
> Bright graduated from Caltech in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Aeronautical Engineering
> He worked for Boeing for 3 years on the development of the 757 stabilizer trim system
So? The comparison still makes no sense. Those switches cannot be accidentally flipped, and they are in a place where the pilots' hands have no action to take at all during that period. That is very different from mixing up two similar weapons in a similar location.
Location of the switches: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/c-gettyimag...
Here is a video of a takeoff and climb in a 787: https://youtu.be/TTZozTaWiRo
The pilots have no business with their hands in the area of those switches in that phase of the flight (9:30+ in the video). They don't even have to touch the throttle, and even if they did, that's a long way from where you touch the throttle down to the base where those switches are. Which you can't just flip either.
How is that even remotely similar to that cop's situation?
3 replies →
What were they confusing the switches with though? Are there two other switches they would be toggling at that phase?
Perhaps they were very very confused and thought they had just arrived at the terminal?
I've turned on the windshield wipers when reaching to turn on the headlights. Fortunately, neither were critical subsystems.
This is why the pilot doing the action annunciates it and the other pilot checks it. Pilots are trained not to silently do things.
Also, a cop who can either read or write can't be expected to not make mistakes.