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The difference is that the mh370 pilot deliberately took actions to avoid tracking. At some point if you can’t trust the captain of your vessel, that person can

The difference is that the mh370 pilot deliberately took actions to avoid tracking. At some point if you can’t trust the captain of your vessel, that person can disrupt or disable most any system put in place. If the captain of the titanic intended on sinking the ship without a trace, he most certainly would have succeeded as well. A more apt comparison would be AF447, which took a few days before the wreckage was found. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

ozr 3y ago
Physical access can generally circumvent any security precautions, but it seems like there are some fairly simple schemes that would work well to prevent a disturbed captain. E.g.: disabling the tracking system could require accessing a section of the plane inaccessible while it's in flight. Combine that with a hardware interlock system that would prevent the plane from taking off when it's disabled, and that should be sufficient in the vast majority of cases to prevent 'lost' planes. Is there ever a valid reason to disable the recorder/tracking systems in flight?
- logifail 3y ago
  > Physical access can generally circumvent any security precautions, but it seems like there are some fairly simple schemes that would work well to prevent a disturbed captain I can't be the only one thinking that in the situation where we postulate losing trust in the captain, whether tracking is switched on or not is a relatively minor issue, compared with - say - the captain deliberately flying the aircraft into a mountainside.
  - ozr 3y ago
    You're definitely not wrong. Most civil aviation authorities I'm aware of have some profound issues with their policies around pilots and mental health issues. Fixing that is more likely to prevent the issue in the first place. That's closer to the root cause and something that shouldn't be ignored. But parallel to that (and unfortunately-but-most-likely in lieu of): we simply shouldn't be losing large aircraft and having no idea what happened.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      The biggest issue with all policies is the same with red flag laws - and even attempted mention of potentially having an issue grounds you and you lose your job; this makes the issue that much worse.
      - ipython 3y ago
        Yes. This is dangerous because pilots are afraid to disclose depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions for fear of losing their livelihood. For example, the FAA automatically considers an ADHD diagnosis disqualifying for airline pilots: https://pilot-protection-services.aopa.org/news/2018/february/01/adhd-and-the-faa https://pilot-protection-services.aopa.org/news/2018/februar.... This results in a “don’t ask don’t tell” situation which can be even worse.
    - logifail 3y ago
      > we simply shouldn't be losing large aircraft and having no idea what happened Maybe it doesn't nearly happen often enough to make this any kind of a priority?
      - ozr 3y ago
        Why pay for the recorder at all then? Sub-total loss is presumably much more common and it’s useful there, but the adjustments to prevent it being disabled/make it more durable would be helpful there, too.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        From the article: All of the preparation is, inarguably, effective: Never has a recovered black box been so badly damaged that it yields no usable data. That seems to me like they might be at a sufficient level of durability already.
        ozr 3y ago
        I worded that poorly; durability in the sense of being resistant to attack by bad actors, not in the event of a crash.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Which has occurred - perhaps if we actually want to try to control for “insane pilots” there has to be some way for someone on or off the plane to force it into autopilot with cat 5 autoland at the nearest airstrip.
    - ipython 3y ago
      … which then extends the critical flight controls security surface area to entities on the ground that have no vested interest in my safety? No thank you, I’ll take my chances with the flight crew which in 99.99999% of cases are also interested in arriving home safely.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        The flight crew always arrives at the scene of the accident first. I've read that pilots sometimes remark that their focus is on saving their own asses, and if they do that, the passengers will be fine.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        There are at least 7 commercial passenger flight suicides in history (plus the four on 9/11, though that's arguably a closed vector now, and some others on non-revenue flights). There are around 100K pilots working today in commercial aviation [not all Part 121 (airline)], so perhaps 500K, and surely less than 700K, total over the course of time. If we posit a successful suicidal action rate of 7 in 700K, that's only "five nines" over the course of their shortened career or 99.999%, but could become seven or even eight nines on a per-flight basis. I'm 100% with you on the desire to not have ground-link control (and, for me, to keep two crew in Part 121 operations); I just figured I'd estimate the math.
        ipython 3y ago
        I had a feeling someone would try and do this calculation. :) I would calculate it instead based on the number of flights rather than the number of airmen. It doesn’t make any sense if the units for the numerator are “number of successful suicide flights” and the demoninator is “number of airmen”. I would not count the four flights in 2001, personally. Those are not suicide by flight personnel. If you look at an average of say 25m flights per year since the year 2000, then you would have about 550mm flights. Even if you include the 4 tragic flights of 9/11 in the numerator, my 7 nines are very conservative.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Captain needs to be able to pull a circuit breaker for virtually anything, in case of electrical fault, fire, misbehavior, needing to hard-reset some bit of avionics, etc. Commercial passenger aircraft have redundant systems and you can disable almost anything as needed and still fly (up to a point of course) in case of emergency.
  - ozr 3y ago
    I can understand needing to have that option for most things, but a blackbox flight recorder ought to, by it's basic design, be read-only and have little to no dependencies with the rest of the aircraft. E.g.: a failed APU should not disable the blackbox, since you want to be able to record that the APU failed.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      Yeah I'm sort of speculating and agree for the most part but obviously the data recorder is communicating with every other system on the aircraft for which it records data. If the data recorder had some kind of fault that was creating interference with these systems, maybe there's a scenario where you have to be able to shut it down. If I'm thousands of feet above the ground and the system keeping me in the air has some kind of fault, when I say "Hal, shut down that faulty system" I don't wan't the answer to be "I'm sorry Dave, I cannot do that."
    - refurb 3y ago
      Electrical wiring fault starts a fire. Not sure we don’t want a pilot to be able to pull circuit breakers for everything on board.
    - antonjs 3y ago
      You could always have some breakers that could only be pulled by the chief flight attendant, or at least signal to someone in the cabin they were being pulled.
      - samtho 3y ago
- ipython 3y ago
  One could say that about all sorts of capabilities in an aircraft that, in normal operation, seems insane. Is there ever a valid reason to fly a cargo plane inverted? See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705 for the answer.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Airliners are simply not designed to fly inverted. In Tex Johnson's famous barrel roll of a 707, he kept positive g on the airframe at all times. One problem with flying inverted is the bottom of the airplane tends to accumulate junk - nuts, bolts, dropped tools, lunch boxes, dead mice, etc. Turning the airplane over means all that junk falls into the machinery, potentially jamming it.
    - ipython 3y ago
      Right- in the FedEx case it was a last ditch effort to literally knock the suicidal flight crew member off his balance and regain control of the aircraft. If you have a 'nanny' computer telling you that you're unable to do that, those crewmembers may have ended up dead instead. Point being, in an unforeseen emergency, allowing crews to override the normal safety mechanisms may in fact save lives.
      - askvictor 3y ago
        I guess the question is what's the likelihood of such a situation, vs the likelihood of the situation where a 'nanny' computer prevents the crew doing something dangerous?
        ithinkso 3y ago
        And then we have 'nanny' computers of 737 MAX that caused crashes (more than one) against the pilots actions to save it
        3y ago
- HWR_14 3y ago
  Do we care about preventing a disturbed captain from preventing recording? They can already crash the plane and kill everyone on board. I don't really care about their record keeping in that instance.
  - pas 3y ago
    it seems much more important to have a clean and unambiguous record than to start the usual finger pointing
  - sidlls 3y ago
    It's necessary to rule out mechanical and other system failures, i.e., to provide evidence that it was a disturbed pilot and not some other cause. Aviation incident investigations are quite thorough--orders of magnitude more rigorous than in the software industry in general.
Jyaif 3y ago
> A more apt comparison would be AF447, which took a few days before the wreckage was found it took more than a year to find the wreckage of AF447 and the black box (as per both TFA and your wikipedia link)
- ipython 3y ago
  Thank you. I can’t edit my post now to correct myself unfortunately.
hungryforcodes 3y ago
> The difference is that the mh370 pilot deliberately took actions to avoid tracking. I'm sorry, when did we decide this? As far as I can tell this is just one of a number of different theories on MH370s disappearance.
- ipython 3y ago
  It’s obvious that we cannot know for sure since we have not found the wreckage, but no other theory I’m aware of can fit the facts as we know them.
  - hungryforcodes 3y ago
    It's because he's Muslim huh? I mean there are lots of theories. https://www.salon.com/2023/03/10/mh370-malaysia-plane-disappeared-netflix/ https://www.salon.com/2023/03/10/mh370-malaysia-plane-disapp... My favorite is still the one about the fire caused by the windshield electrical heater. There is precedence on other Boeing 777s for this to have played out. It was a known problem. If it really was a suicide drop into the ocean...why wait 8 hours...just...do it...
    - ipython 3y ago
      Wow. That escalated quickly. It has nothing to do with the fact he was Muslim and everything to do with the fact that there were no attempts to contact other planes or atc for help. I do not appreciate your false assertion and encourage you to retract your statement. I am not an expert in the 777 electrical systems but the two minute delta between the last radio transmission - where there were no audial warnings and the pilots were calm - and the transponder ceasing to transmit seems unreasonable for a catastrophic event to take out these systems.
      - hungryforcodes 3y ago
        > The difference is that the mh370 pilot deliberately took actions to avoid tracking. I'll bother to defend myself here -- we don't know what happened. It could have been hijacked, it could have been a CIA operation, it could have been many different things. That you conclude it was the captain doing a suicide run does smell of something strange, considering the plane was in the air for 8 hours before disappearing from satellite contact. That's all I will say on this. Downvote me as much as you want.
tristanb 3y ago
We absolutely do not know the captain did anything malicious , and he could have been a hero. So let’s not make statements like that.
mariuolo 3y ago
> A more apt comparison would be AF447, which took a few days before the wreckage was found. Days? I thought it was found after two years.

ozr 3y ago

Physical access can generally circumvent any security precautions, but it seems like there are some fairly simple schemes that would work well to prevent a disturbed captain. E.g.: disabling the tracking system could require accessing a section of the plane inaccessible while it's in flight. Combine that with a hardware interlock system that would prevent the plane from taking off when it's disabled, and that should be sufficient in the vast majority of cases to prevent 'lost' planes. Is there ever a valid reason to disable the recorder/tracking systems in flight?

logifail 3y ago
> Physical access can generally circumvent any security precautions, but it seems like there are some fairly simple schemes that would work well to prevent a disturbed captain I can't be the only one thinking that in the situation where we postulate losing trust in the captain, whether tracking is switched on or not is a relatively minor issue, compared with - say - the captain deliberately flying the aircraft into a mountainside.
- ozr 3y ago
  You're definitely not wrong. Most civil aviation authorities I'm aware of have some profound issues with their policies around pilots and mental health issues. Fixing that is more likely to prevent the issue in the first place. That's closer to the root cause and something that shouldn't be ignored. But parallel to that (and unfortunately-but-most-likely in lieu of): we simply shouldn't be losing large aircraft and having no idea what happened.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The biggest issue with all policies is the same with red flag laws - and even attempted mention of potentially having an issue grounds you and you lose your job; this makes the issue that much worse.
    - ipython 3y ago
      Yes. This is dangerous because pilots are afraid to disclose depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions for fear of losing their livelihood. For example, the FAA automatically considers an ADHD diagnosis disqualifying for airline pilots: https://pilot-protection-services.aopa.org/news/2018/february/01/adhd-and-the-faa https://pilot-protection-services.aopa.org/news/2018/februar.... This results in a “don’t ask don’t tell” situation which can be even worse.
  - logifail 3y ago
    > we simply shouldn't be losing large aircraft and having no idea what happened Maybe it doesn't nearly happen often enough to make this any kind of a priority?
    - ozr 3y ago
      Why pay for the recorder at all then? Sub-total loss is presumably much more common and it’s useful there, but the adjustments to prevent it being disabled/make it more durable would be helpful there, too.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        From the article: All of the preparation is, inarguably, effective: Never has a recovered black box been so badly damaged that it yields no usable data. That seems to me like they might be at a sufficient level of durability already.
        ozr 3y ago
        I worded that poorly; durability in the sense of being resistant to attack by bad actors, not in the event of a crash.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Which has occurred - perhaps if we actually want to try to control for “insane pilots” there has to be some way for someone on or off the plane to force it into autopilot with cat 5 autoland at the nearest airstrip.
  - ipython 3y ago
    … which then extends the critical flight controls security surface area to entities on the ground that have no vested interest in my safety? No thank you, I’ll take my chances with the flight crew which in 99.99999% of cases are also interested in arriving home safely.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      The flight crew always arrives at the scene of the accident first. I've read that pilots sometimes remark that their focus is on saving their own asses, and if they do that, the passengers will be fine.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      There are at least 7 commercial passenger flight suicides in history (plus the four on 9/11, though that's arguably a closed vector now, and some others on non-revenue flights). There are around 100K pilots working today in commercial aviation [not all Part 121 (airline)], so perhaps 500K, and surely less than 700K, total over the course of time. If we posit a successful suicidal action rate of 7 in 700K, that's only "five nines" over the course of their shortened career or 99.999%, but could become seven or even eight nines on a per-flight basis. I'm 100% with you on the desire to not have ground-link control (and, for me, to keep two crew in Part 121 operations); I just figured I'd estimate the math.
      - ipython 3y ago
        I had a feeling someone would try and do this calculation. :) I would calculate it instead based on the number of flights rather than the number of airmen. It doesn’t make any sense if the units for the numerator are “number of successful suicide flights” and the demoninator is “number of airmen”. I would not count the four flights in 2001, personally. Those are not suicide by flight personnel. If you look at an average of say 25m flights per year since the year 2000, then you would have about 550mm flights. Even if you include the 4 tragic flights of 9/11 in the numerator, my 7 nines are very conservative.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Captain needs to be able to pull a circuit breaker for virtually anything, in case of electrical fault, fire, misbehavior, needing to hard-reset some bit of avionics, etc. Commercial passenger aircraft have redundant systems and you can disable almost anything as needed and still fly (up to a point of course) in case of emergency.
- ozr 3y ago
  I can understand needing to have that option for most things, but a blackbox flight recorder ought to, by it's basic design, be read-only and have little to no dependencies with the rest of the aircraft. E.g.: a failed APU should not disable the blackbox, since you want to be able to record that the APU failed.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Yeah I'm sort of speculating and agree for the most part but obviously the data recorder is communicating with every other system on the aircraft for which it records data. If the data recorder had some kind of fault that was creating interference with these systems, maybe there's a scenario where you have to be able to shut it down. If I'm thousands of feet above the ground and the system keeping me in the air has some kind of fault, when I say "Hal, shut down that faulty system" I don't wan't the answer to be "I'm sorry Dave, I cannot do that."
  - refurb 3y ago
    Electrical wiring fault starts a fire. Not sure we don’t want a pilot to be able to pull circuit breakers for everything on board.
  - antonjs 3y ago
    You could always have some breakers that could only be pulled by the chief flight attendant, or at least signal to someone in the cabin they were being pulled.
    - samtho 3y ago
ipython 3y ago
One could say that about all sorts of capabilities in an aircraft that, in normal operation, seems insane. Is there ever a valid reason to fly a cargo plane inverted? See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705 for the answer.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Airliners are simply not designed to fly inverted. In Tex Johnson's famous barrel roll of a 707, he kept positive g on the airframe at all times. One problem with flying inverted is the bottom of the airplane tends to accumulate junk - nuts, bolts, dropped tools, lunch boxes, dead mice, etc. Turning the airplane over means all that junk falls into the machinery, potentially jamming it.
  - ipython 3y ago
    Right- in the FedEx case it was a last ditch effort to literally knock the suicidal flight crew member off his balance and regain control of the aircraft. If you have a 'nanny' computer telling you that you're unable to do that, those crewmembers may have ended up dead instead. Point being, in an unforeseen emergency, allowing crews to override the normal safety mechanisms may in fact save lives.
    - askvictor 3y ago
      I guess the question is what's the likelihood of such a situation, vs the likelihood of the situation where a 'nanny' computer prevents the crew doing something dangerous?
      - ithinkso 3y ago
        And then we have 'nanny' computers of 737 MAX that caused crashes (more than one) against the pilots actions to save it
        3y ago
HWR_14 3y ago
Do we care about preventing a disturbed captain from preventing recording? They can already crash the plane and kill everyone on board. I don't really care about their record keeping in that instance.
- pas 3y ago
  it seems much more important to have a clean and unambiguous record than to start the usual finger pointing
- sidlls 3y ago
  It's necessary to rule out mechanical and other system failures, i.e., to provide evidence that it was a disturbed pilot and not some other cause. Aviation incident investigations are quite thorough--orders of magnitude more rigorous than in the software industry in general.

Jyaif 3y ago

> A more apt comparison would be AF447, which took a few days before the wreckage was found it took more than a year to find the wreckage of AF447 and the black box (as per both TFA and your wikipedia link)

ipython 3y ago
Thank you. I can’t edit my post now to correct myself unfortunately.

hungryforcodes 3y ago

> The difference is that the mh370 pilot deliberately took actions to avoid tracking. I'm sorry, when did we decide this? As far as I can tell this is just one of a number of different theories on MH370s disappearance.

ipython 3y ago
It’s obvious that we cannot know for sure since we have not found the wreckage, but no other theory I’m aware of can fit the facts as we know them.
- hungryforcodes 3y ago
  It's because he's Muslim huh? I mean there are lots of theories. https://www.salon.com/2023/03/10/mh370-malaysia-plane-disappeared-netflix/ https://www.salon.com/2023/03/10/mh370-malaysia-plane-disapp... My favorite is still the one about the fire caused by the windshield electrical heater. There is precedence on other Boeing 777s for this to have played out. It was a known problem. If it really was a suicide drop into the ocean...why wait 8 hours...just...do it...
  - ipython 3y ago
    Wow. That escalated quickly. It has nothing to do with the fact he was Muslim and everything to do with the fact that there were no attempts to contact other planes or atc for help. I do not appreciate your false assertion and encourage you to retract your statement. I am not an expert in the 777 electrical systems but the two minute delta between the last radio transmission - where there were no audial warnings and the pilots were calm - and the transponder ceasing to transmit seems unreasonable for a catastrophic event to take out these systems.
    - hungryforcodes 3y ago
      > The difference is that the mh370 pilot deliberately took actions to avoid tracking. I'll bother to defend myself here -- we don't know what happened. It could have been hijacked, it could have been a CIA operation, it could have been many different things. That you conclude it was the captain doing a suicide run does smell of something strange, considering the plane was in the air for 8 hours before disappearing from satellite contact. That's all I will say on this. Downvote me as much as you want.

tristanb 3y ago

We absolutely do not know the captain did anything malicious , and he could have been a hero. So let’s not make statements like that.

mariuolo 3y ago

> A more apt comparison would be AF447, which took a few days before the wreckage was found. Days? I thought it was found after two years.