Comment by epolanski
7 months ago
The car equivalent is being on a highway and "mistakenly" pulling the hand brakes, except that there are 2 hand brakes and you need to first unlock both of them.
That's very hard to do by panic and mistake, if not impossible by design.
On pprune there is a professional pilot that says they had multiple instances of inadverent switching off fuel switches. They do it every startup, shutdown and training captains (the captain on this flight was pilot not flying, he had >10k hours) do it all the time in the sim to trigger engine out scenario during training
I pull my handbrake every time I park my car, but never mistake it for the windshield wiper while the car is moving
There is no shortage of people who press the wrong pedal or button in a car or elsewhere. But of course it could never happen to you, you're special!
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Nope, I strongly disagree with that comparison. One doesn't need to pull up a big stick in hand using elbow and shoulder to flip this fuel switch _down_. Would a car's hand brake stop your engine if it's thumb-push-button lock failed silently and you happen to let something fall on it, like a hand? no. But this little fuel switch would.
Bad analogy because pilots are trained and rehearse and practice memory items until they are instinctual.
> impossible by design.
Deflecting that the human is the weakest part of the system. One or other may have panicked and made a mistake, made a mistake unintentionally, went crazy and doomed the flight, or intentionally doomed the flight for some socioeconomic reasons. These are speculative possibilities that we don't know yet, and may never know; we only know what has definitely happened from the evidence per the investigation. It's standing way out over one's feet to declare from an armchair that it was "definitely" X or Y before the investigation is complete.
Forget my words then and take those from aviation experts.
The fact that a pilot would cut off fuel from both engines, in sequence while taking off is virtually impossible to happen unless deliberate.
Hence the hand brake comparison, it does not come natural to use it while driving.
Bare in mind there have been there have been what, 100+ million flights? so "virtually impossible" things can, and will happen
It was done. Yes. There is no way to determine from the evidence why it was done, how much conscious or not thought was put into it, or the thought process behind it.