5 ms·

Uh oh. What are they going to do when they discover that there aren't any average pilots? https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-dis

• kalenx 7y ago
  Average does not have the same meaning in the context of this link and yours. We are not talking about physical measurements here.
  • chrisseaton 7y ago
    Why doesn’t the same principle apply? One pilot is very good at one skill, another very good at some other skill. There exists no mean pilot that is fairly good at both, so designing or testing for that is a bad idea. Replace body dimensions with skill sets and it’s the same issue.
    • SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Really, they shouldn't be trying to test for an "average" pilot, they should be testing for a "bad" pilot - one who can only meet the minimum requirements for a pilot's license.
    • lostconfused 7y ago
      You can train a skill and improve on it. You can't train your head shape or arm length nearly as much. The brain is more malleable than some of the other body parts.
      • chrisseaton 7y ago
        I'm not sure what you're suggesting then - we should train all pilots to be uniformly brilliant at everything so there's no variation and we can use any pilot to test, before we test any more aircraft?
        • stan_rogers 7y ago
          No, it would be about making things safe/usable for the merely competent and not relying on "brilliance".
          • chrisseaton 7y ago
            Right, but my point is there may not actually be any pilots who are merely competent at all skills. The distribution of skills may be more complex than that. You may be making things safe for someone who does not exist, which is pointless, and you'd be better off making things safe for something other than a simple mean average.
            • inimino 7y ago
              You're going off on a tangent based on semantics and speculation. Pilots who are competent at every basic skill, but don't have years of combat or test pilot experience or extensive experience on the plane in question absolutely exist and that's what we're talking about.
            • anigbrowl 7y ago
              You're getting hung up on this, like looking for the individual in a population who exactly matches an average, while ignoring the normal distribution that surrounds it. Don't obsess over the point, just center your window function around it.
    • anigbrowl 7y ago
      You understand a Venn diagram just fine though. It's the same sort of problem, just generalize to n dimensions and use a clustering algorithm, or decompose an overly complex problem into multiple clusters.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• tyingq 7y ago
  I imagine they could use total flight hours and total 737 flight hours...or some other metric that roughly correlates to experience and skills.
  • AdrianB1 7y ago
    Sport pilot here: total flight hours on an airliner is an almost useless metric, the difference between 2000 hours and 5000 hours is negligible. I know pilots with over 10,000 hours that died in stupid accidents, I know instructors that never performed maneuvers that are almost routine to other pilots that don't even have 500 hours. I know dozens of pilots and there is no average one, some are very good and some are barely flying, with no middle ground. It is an area where you are either good or pretty bad.
    • tyingq 7y ago
      Is there any data that would show that? Like crashes with pilot error as a contributing cause mapped to hours, and weighted by bands of hours.
      • AdrianB1 7y ago
        For airliners, there is less room for error caused by the pilots (but it still happens). In General Aviation, the accident rate is more than an order of magnitude higher per mile (FAA has the data on their site) and by far in most cases it is pilot error, even if GA planes are less reliable. The official statistics are not very accurate because the GA accidents are investigated with less rigor, there are no black boxes to record what really happened and the pilots lie about the real cause (in more than 50% of the accidents I personally know). It is hard to prove all these, but some data exists on the FAA site, the inside info will never be public anywhere to consult. By inside info I am talking about the real story told by the pilots that had the accidents, in small communities people talk very openly about it. LE. I mentioned General Aviation because I know pilots with over 10,000 on B737 that died flying smaller planes or not able to fly at all smaller planes.
      • AdrianB1 7y ago
• dahart 7y ago
  I love those articles, and the lesson learned from them. But there is no automatic parallel in this situation, in fact the opposite here. The NTSB isn’t suggesting that Boeing model a single “average” pilot. They’re suggesting that Boeing test using many pilots who are not highly trained in test procedures. The “flaw of averages” problem is one of combining averages in multiple dimensions and assuming the result is still average. That flaw is absent when you test with multiple average people and categorize the results for each dimension separately. Also, the outcome of the flaw of averages was to make various parts of the plane adjustable. In the case of an air emergency, your response time is not adjustable, you either solve it or you die. The NTSB’s suggestion is to understand how normal people react to ensure both ergonomics and training are adequate. In any case, recommending that testing be done with people less knowledgeable than the experts, who don’t instantly know the right answers, can likely only result in better outcomes, not worse.
  • alexis_fr 7y ago
    I like the idea that they pick pilots at random: - Either it’s Boeing’s fault for improper UX, - Either it’s Boeing’s fault for pilot certifications not being stringent enough. In either case, the aircraft manufacturer must improve. I think of it as an “integration test”, “let’s see how the pilot+plane integrate together”. Not necessarily Boeing, btw. It could be Airbus. It could even be a move from the US regulator which advantages Boeing compared to Airbus depending on whether Airbus planes were tested with skilled pilots.
    • mlyle 7y ago
      It's always fun to look at the performance figures in aircraft manuals. Somewhere, a skilled test pilot got those numbers in a pristine plane. But mere humans in a real-world plane will typically not obtain them.
• larrik 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure they mean "active duty pilots" va "dedicated test pilots", and I also assume they mean in addition to the test pilot tests they already do.
• oconnor663 7y ago
  > Once these and other design solutions were put into place, pilot performance soared, and the U.S. air force became the most dominant air force on the planet. Some of that trend miiight be correlation and not causation.
• mark-r 7y ago
  A friend of mine was once told to make his product idiot-proof. He said "sure, as soon as you give me the spec for the standard idiot."
  • anigbrowl 7y ago
    That's a really old joke and its purpose is to deflect rather than to illuminate. Your friend was trying to sound smart to distract from his unwillingness or inability to come to grips with the underlying design issues.
    • mark-r 7y ago
      Maybe it was an old joke, but it was new to me at the time - only time I had heard it, and I haven't heard it again in the many years since. And I think it says something useful about the impossibility of the task. The domains we work in are all about the expected inputs and expected outputs, and it takes a special kind of imagination to come up with parameters outside of those.
    • serf 7y ago
      >Your friend was trying to sound smart to distract from his unwillingness or inability to come to grips with the underlying design issues. Stout claim. So I presume that you've witnessed any design or engineering firm that was able to deal with every 'idiot' within their problem domain? I think OPs interpretation of the saying is more correct. The saying is bringing up the impossibility of designing something for everyone , not the deflecting of labor in some snarky way.