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I rip the FAA for that. The level of air safety we have is because we have traditionally protected it fiercely. Within minutes of the second plane going down, t
by duado 8y ago
I rip the FAA for that. The level of air safety we have is because we have traditionally protected it fiercely. Within minutes of the second plane going down, the type should have been grounded until the FAA could figure out whether they were related. If not, they can unground them later.
- rootusrootus 8y agoThere is a good reason we teach kids the allegory about the boy who cried wolf. If the FAA panics that easily they will destroy their creditability just as quickly as if they take too long. If they really did get new evidence yesterday and it prompted their decision, then I think they deserve more credit than the other world agencies that freaked out in a matter of hours. I want our regulators to be cold and analytical.
- dragontamer 8y agoI agree. I have qualms about the process, but I'm always nitpicky about various things. Boeing was far too involved in this decision matter IMO for example, but that's mostly an issue of optics. Overall, I'm pretty happy with what I saw out of the FAA. It just seems like the FAA may have gotten the data last. Canada got it before we did. The EU got the blackbox first, so once they looked at the data, they banned the plane. China's response may have been preemptive, since there's no way they could have looked through the data at that speed. Perhaps we should be pissed off at getting the data-last. But that's hardly the FAA's fault (maybe a State-department thing). In the future, Boeing needs to at least appear more neutral and less like a lobbyist when these events occur. There's significant distrust in our system these days, our regulators need to understand what it looks like when they're talking with the companies who make the plane before getting the black box...
- inferiorhuman 8y agoIt just seems like the FAA may have gotten the data last. Canada got it before we did. Nope, the FAA had the data before the Canadians.
- duado 8y ago“Panics that easily”? With two aircraft going down? If this was the criterion, how many such false panics would have happened in the last 30 years?
- cblades 8y agoLook up any given commercial airframe and you will see multiple crashes. Literally every one would have been grounded had the FAA grounded the type after 2 accidents.
- ahi 8y agoThe first accident involving a 737 occurred more than 4 years after introduction. This is 2 fatal crashes in the first year with only a few hundred aircraft delivered.
- oldgradstudent 8y agoAnd that was in the early 1970s, where crashes were much more common. The first crash of the 777 occurred 15 years after it was launched with 1500 aircraft delivered, and even in that crash foul play is suspected. The first crash (ignoring hijacking) of the 767 occurred almost a decade after it was launched, and the second was almost two decades after launch, and it's still not clear if it was suicide.
- duado 8y agoThe first fatal crash of the 777 was actually Asiana 214 and that was complete pilot error. I think you’re referencing MH370 a few months later.
- oldgradstudent 8y agoYes, you're right. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19398332 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19398332
- 8y ago
- kjar 8y agoSpare us the moralizing please.
- threeseed 8y agoIt is not panicking or freaking out to err on the side of caution and ground flights. In fact it seems quite prudent for a regulator to do this.
- ncallaway 8y ago> It is not panicking or freaking out to err on the side of caution and ground flights. It can be, though. There is a risk inherent to air travel. The safest thing to do would be to ground all flights of all aircraft permanently. That wouldn't be prudent, though, because we can mitigate the risk until the benefit of air travel outweighs the risk of dying during air travel. The prudent thing to do is to carefully evaluate the risks, and make a determination when the risks become too great.
- FartyMcFarter 8y agoA statistically unlikely pair of crashes or the same model of plane, same phase of flight, same consequences, and similar altitude variations would seem to be enough justification for a prudent grounding. If a company releases a new version of their software and it crashes twice in similar ways (much more frequently than the previous version), that is also enough reason to rollback the release and investigate, especially if the software has any critical use cases.
- snowwrestler 8y agoIf you release a software update and only 2 out of thousands of nodes are experiencing problems, would you honestly take the whole application offline over that? Most software companies would not, in my experience. They would take a close look at those two nodes first. Obviously commercial aviation has much higher standards than software vendors generally do. Airline tickets don’t generally come with 5,000 word EULAs with all-caps provisions like “THIS SOFTWARE IS NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE AND SHOULD NOT BE USED FOR ANY REASON AND YOU ASSUME ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY NEGATIVE OUTCOMES OF ANY KIND” etc. Two crashes in close succession seems like an obvious abnormality. But because standards are so high, to commercial aviation providers and regulators, every single crash is treated as a significant abnormality. So the question is, why don’t they ground all models of a certain plane after a single crash? Once you understand that, the same logic applies to two crashes.