4 ms·

If anyone is interested in recently made content that recaps the whole thing, all the available information, some of the speculation, including the most recent

by sofixa 2y ago

If anyone is interested in recently made content that recaps the whole thing, all the available information, some of the speculation, including the most recent news/information: * video by Mentour Pilot - https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk https://youtu.be/Y5K9HBiJpuk * great read, as usual, by Admiral Cloudberg, slightly older: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-years-on-what-do-we-know-about-the-disappearance-of-malaysia-airlines-77fa5244bf99 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
“Malaysia Airlines operations…were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website, which, as they would only realize hours later, simply continued to display an aircraft’s projected path if its transponder stopped broadcasting position information.” What in the actual fuck. “…the supposed signals from the black boxes must have been false. Only much later was it discovered that the signals had probably come from the scanning equipment pinging itself.” Wat. “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.” WAT.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  You look for the keys only under the light pole where there is light. If you can’t find them there assume a black hole materialized and swallowed them then disappeared. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    More generally, sticking with an approach that "works" by some shallow criterion, even though on deeper analysis it doesn't work, because the alternatives are not as good by the shallow criterion. The example I point to is tokamaks for fusion energy.
- grotorea 2y ago
  After a lot of aircraft accident youtube videos, I can think of a couple where people misunderstanding where their computers get their information from and how they work. * This one where the operations team apparently doesn't understand how their flight tracker works, and/or it fails to inform their users that last contact was X hours ago. * One where the aircraft has a broken altimeter, and the suspicious pilots decide to ask the ATC for altitude confirmation, but the ATC radar only gets horizontal coordinates, the altitude information that ATC sees actually comes from a datastream from the aircraft itself. So they fatally decided to trust that instead of their own aircraft radar altimeter which was correctly telling them they were about to crash. * The aircraft had either a single failed engine or the wheels were stuck outside, and the pilots asked the computer for how far they could travel in their current state, assuming it worked like a car, by projecting current consumption, but actually the computer just uses fixed data that does not take such exceptional situations into account. So they ran out of fuel early. > “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.” > WAT. It seems the police department has insufficient funding to help drunks look for keys in the dark.
  - carlmr 2y ago
    You could of course blame the individuals for not knowing where which information comes from, but that wouldn't help in avoiding such problems in the future. I think it's a UX failure in some sense. It's important information to know which number comes from what source. So it should be clearly visible if a trajectory is prediction without up to date positional data. It should be clearly visible which values are from the aircraft and which are from the ground. It should be clearly visible that a range estimate is derived only from fuel sensors. I hope that the 5Y process or whatever they used came to this conclusion as well, and not human error. Human error is constant, design issues can be fixed. Sometimes I think UX design should be mandatory for software developers and engineers. Even only reading The Design of Everyday Things would probably prevent a lot of catastrophes.
    - krisoft 2y ago
      > Sometimes I think UX design should be mandatory for software developers and engineers. Human Factors is very much part of every airplane's design. From the ground up, and it involves all roles and every subsystems. > Even only reading The Design of Everyday Things would probably prevent a lot of catastrophes. I think you have a twisted assumption about how much care goes into aviation UX. The people who do these designs did much more than read a single book. > It should be clearly visible that a range estimate is derived only from fuel sensors. Good plan! Now tell us how you will do it. (Also clearly you are misunderstanding even the problem. The problem was that the range estimate was NOT derived from fuel sensors.)
- krisoft 2y ago
  > WAT. What what? Do you want to pay for the search? How much do you want to pay for it? Every human endeavour is constrained by resources. The art of doing anything is figuring out how to best employ the available resources to achieve goals. > What in the actual fuck. Is this your first time hearing about humans being confused by complicated technology?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Every human endeavour is constrained by resources There is a difference between constraining activities based on resources at hand and adopting a hypothesis because it favours your resource constraints. (Searching for keys under the light is reasonable. Concluding the keys must be under the light is not.) > Is this your first time hearing about humans being confused by complicated technology? An airline using a free consumer tool [1] to track its planes is not a problem of complicated technology. (FlightExplorer has a professional edition, but it runs natively. If flightops were looking at a website, they were essentially using Google Flights to track their planes.) [1] https://travel.flightexplorer.com https://travel.flightexplorer.com
    - krisoft 2y ago
      > Searching for keys under the light is reasonable. Concluding the keys must be under the light is not. Yes. And there is nothing to indicate that they concluded that the keys must be under the lights. In fact there is every reason to assume that they choose this assumption to fit their resource constraints. Because the other option would have been to not even start searching. But turns out if you assume people are stupid, then they will appear stupid. > An airline using a free consumer tool [1] to track its planes is not a problem of complicated technology. Everything about aviation is complicated technology. The fact that there are free tools which provide almost the same answer the professional tools do, but can be misleading in edge cases is further evidence that the technology is complicated. Also this is the problem with vacuous statements. The statement, I quote "What in the actual fuck." does not let us know what the commenter found curious about the situation. I thought it was that an operator misread the display. You think it is that the operator's had a "free" display instead of a professional one. But who knows. We could even ask why is it the airline who was bumbling around instead of just calling the ATC that the airplane is overdue and letting them figure out with their professional tools and training. Or maybe they are just surprised that airplanes sometimes fly and sometimes not. Who knows.
- tyingq 2y ago
  That top one really gets me. That employees in flight operations wouldn't understand the concept of dead reckoning is used in a flight tracker. Well not that some would have been confused... But that nobody in the room would have raised that over a several hours span.
  - grotorea 2y ago
    Even on a pure UI level, any software used in such a role really ought to warn the user somehow for "this aircraft has been X hours out of contact" in a world where this isn't supposed to happen anymore.
    - tyingq 2y ago
      Agreed, just odd in a room full of experts.
    - SkyPuncher 2y ago
      Sit does. They tell you last report time. You also figure it out pretty quickly when you watch a few plans make physically impossible jumps between their dead reckoning location and their actual location.

by sofixa 2y ago

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

“Malaysia Airlines operations…were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website, which, as they would only realize hours later, simply continued to display an aircraft’s projected path if its transponder stopped broadcasting position information.” What in the actual fuck. “…the supposed signals from the black boxes must have been false. Only much later was it discovered that the signals had probably come from the scanning equipment pinging itself.” Wat. “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.” WAT.

rdtsc 2y ago
You look for the keys only under the light pole where there is light. If you can’t find them there assume a black hole materialized and swallowed them then disappeared. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
- pfdietz 2y ago
  More generally, sticking with an approach that "works" by some shallow criterion, even though on deeper analysis it doesn't work, because the alternatives are not as good by the shallow criterion. The example I point to is tokamaks for fusion energy.
grotorea 2y ago
After a lot of aircraft accident youtube videos, I can think of a couple where people misunderstanding where their computers get their information from and how they work. * This one where the operations team apparently doesn't understand how their flight tracker works, and/or it fails to inform their users that last contact was X hours ago. * One where the aircraft has a broken altimeter, and the suspicious pilots decide to ask the ATC for altitude confirmation, but the ATC radar only gets horizontal coordinates, the altitude information that ATC sees actually comes from a datastream from the aircraft itself. So they fatally decided to trust that instead of their own aircraft radar altimeter which was correctly telling them they were about to crash. * The aircraft had either a single failed engine or the wheels were stuck outside, and the pilots asked the computer for how far they could travel in their current state, assuming it worked like a car, by projecting current consumption, but actually the computer just uses fixed data that does not take such exceptional situations into account. So they ran out of fuel early. > “ATSB chose to assume that the plane spiraled in close to the seventh arc because it had not received enough funding to extend the width of the search area to 100 nautical miles.” > WAT. It seems the police department has insufficient funding to help drunks look for keys in the dark.
- carlmr 2y ago
  You could of course blame the individuals for not knowing where which information comes from, but that wouldn't help in avoiding such problems in the future. I think it's a UX failure in some sense. It's important information to know which number comes from what source. So it should be clearly visible if a trajectory is prediction without up to date positional data. It should be clearly visible which values are from the aircraft and which are from the ground. It should be clearly visible that a range estimate is derived only from fuel sensors. I hope that the 5Y process or whatever they used came to this conclusion as well, and not human error. Human error is constant, design issues can be fixed. Sometimes I think UX design should be mandatory for software developers and engineers. Even only reading The Design of Everyday Things would probably prevent a lot of catastrophes.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > Sometimes I think UX design should be mandatory for software developers and engineers. Human Factors is very much part of every airplane's design. From the ground up, and it involves all roles and every subsystems. > Even only reading The Design of Everyday Things would probably prevent a lot of catastrophes. I think you have a twisted assumption about how much care goes into aviation UX. The people who do these designs did much more than read a single book. > It should be clearly visible that a range estimate is derived only from fuel sensors. Good plan! Now tell us how you will do it. (Also clearly you are misunderstanding even the problem. The problem was that the range estimate was NOT derived from fuel sensors.)
krisoft 2y ago
> WAT. What what? Do you want to pay for the search? How much do you want to pay for it? Every human endeavour is constrained by resources. The art of doing anything is figuring out how to best employ the available resources to achieve goals. > What in the actual fuck. Is this your first time hearing about humans being confused by complicated technology?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Every human endeavour is constrained by resources There is a difference between constraining activities based on resources at hand and adopting a hypothesis because it favours your resource constraints. (Searching for keys under the light is reasonable. Concluding the keys must be under the light is not.) > Is this your first time hearing about humans being confused by complicated technology? An airline using a free consumer tool [1] to track its planes is not a problem of complicated technology. (FlightExplorer has a professional edition, but it runs natively. If flightops were looking at a website, they were essentially using Google Flights to track their planes.) [1] https://travel.flightexplorer.com https://travel.flightexplorer.com
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > Searching for keys under the light is reasonable. Concluding the keys must be under the light is not. Yes. And there is nothing to indicate that they concluded that the keys must be under the lights. In fact there is every reason to assume that they choose this assumption to fit their resource constraints. Because the other option would have been to not even start searching. But turns out if you assume people are stupid, then they will appear stupid. > An airline using a free consumer tool [1] to track its planes is not a problem of complicated technology. Everything about aviation is complicated technology. The fact that there are free tools which provide almost the same answer the professional tools do, but can be misleading in edge cases is further evidence that the technology is complicated. Also this is the problem with vacuous statements. The statement, I quote "What in the actual fuck." does not let us know what the commenter found curious about the situation. I thought it was that an operator misread the display. You think it is that the operator's had a "free" display instead of a professional one. But who knows. We could even ask why is it the airline who was bumbling around instead of just calling the ATC that the airplane is overdue and letting them figure out with their professional tools and training. Or maybe they are just surprised that airplanes sometimes fly and sometimes not. Who knows.
tyingq 2y ago
That top one really gets me. That employees in flight operations wouldn't understand the concept of dead reckoning is used in a flight tracker. Well not that some would have been confused... But that nobody in the room would have raised that over a several hours span.
- grotorea 2y ago
  Even on a pure UI level, any software used in such a role really ought to warn the user somehow for "this aircraft has been X hours out of contact" in a world where this isn't supposed to happen anymore.
  - tyingq 2y ago
    Agreed, just odd in a room full of experts.
  - SkyPuncher 2y ago
    Sit does. They tell you last report time. You also figure it out pretty quickly when you watch a few plans make physically impossible jumps between their dead reckoning location and their actual location.