8 ms·

A pilot crashed a full passenger jet into the bay, didn't lose his job (2021)

110 points by Stratoscope 2y ago

Stratoscope 2y ago
This was the interesting part for me: > When asked what went wrong, he simply replied, “As you Americans say … I f--ked up.” > Captain Asoh’s frankness and self deprecation helped him preserve his career. Rather than get fired, as was expected, the airline merely demoted him to copilot, before allowing him to work his way back up to captain a few years later. He went on to captain hundreds more flights, all of which landed successfully. > The “I f--ked up” reasoning, or what became more eloquently known in legal circles as “The Asoh Defense” is used to prove that sometimes a frank admission of guilt is the easiest way out of a pickle.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Reminds me of a case in healthcare, where a hospital found genuine apologies were way more effective than stonewalling to try and avoid liability. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/saying-sorry-pays-u-s-doctors-flna1c9457761 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/saying-sorry-pays... > When a treatment goes wrong at a U.S. hospital, fear of a lawsuit usually means “never daring to say you’re sorry.” > That’s not the way it works at the University of Michigan Health System, where lawyers and doctors say admitting mistakes up front and offering compensation before being sued have brought about remarkable savings in money, time and feelings.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    But they have to be genuine, not "We found the button to press to get the best result."
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      Plenty of people can fake genuineness. It doesn't have to be genuine to be effective, it just has to be well received.
      - HarryHirsch 2y ago
        Once a sufficient number of people have peed in the pool the strategy fails to work: this physician is incompetent and dug in, that physician is incompetent and dug in, another physician who is incompetent and refuses to own up, and here's one who is incompetent and pretends to be sorry.
      - throwaway2037 2y ago
        In many Islamic justice systems, there is an option for the offender to pay money to the victim to reduce penalty. I think there are many cases where this could work in a non-Islamic culture, but many people are afraid that "rich people can buy their way out of trouble". There is some truth to it, but the victim may feel the outcome is better after payment.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    Joel Spolsky wrote about this roughly 20 years ago on JoelOnSoftware. IIRC, he hired a locksmith to copy a key and the key didn't work. After the third (and likely final, because of how irritated he was getting) try going back to the shop, the locksmith took a closer look at it and said, "I'm sorry, I see where I went wrong." Instantly, situation defused from major annoyance to "OK, this guy just made a mistake, I'll try it again."
  - astura 2y ago
    This book - https://www.amazon.com/Sorry-Case-Good-Apologies/dp/1982163496 https://www.amazon.com/Sorry-Case-Good-Apologies/dp/19821634... - has an entire chapter dedicated to this.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Hmm yeah but the US legal system is kinda out of control with ridiculous claims and damages granted. If you're going to bankrupt a doctor, it becomes much harder for them to tell the truth.
    - michaelmrose 2y ago
      Can you substantiate this claim?
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    The problem in the US: Accepting guilt may open you to gross negligence with can incur triple damages. As a result most bog standard legal advice in US tells companies to never admit fault when sued. It would be nice to carve out some kind of exception a genuine apology.
  - ilikepi 2y ago
    There was also a Radiolab episode that discussed this idea at a different hospital... https://radiolab.org/podcast/apologetical-2303 https://radiolab.org/podcast/apologetical-2303
- _yb2s 2y ago
  I wish more people knew this… it actually works amazing. Taking responsibility for your mistakes and, better yet, explaining exactly what went wrong and how you will prevent it in the future almost always turns out better, and builds more respect and trust than trying to deny or shift the blame as is usually done. Learning this radically improved my career progression, and personal relationships. It also takes the power away from people that would use it to manipulate or control you.
  - matwood 2y ago
    It's important to note what you're describing is taking real ownership of your screw ups. Like you said, that means doing what you can fix them and prevent them from happening again. Simply saying 'that's on me' and doing nothing to change isn't what's meant here. And yes, I have done this my whole career and it works.
    - _yb2s 2y ago
      Good point- I often see, especially in corporate press releases about security incidents, etc. an apology (often without even directly saying they are responsible- or with a company but no actual individual people taking responsibility), but then no explanation of what they are actually changing to fix the problem. Or there will be a “designated fall guy” who was not personally involved but is apparently paid with a prearranged “golden parachute” to resign and take the blame, which is just a deflection strategy to avoid actually taking responsibility while appearing to do so.
  - inferiorhuman 2y ago
    That works for American aviation because there's a strong culture of avoiding blame. Instead of taking punitive action the usual course is to look for a root cause and how to avoid it. That extends as far as drug/alcohol use where if you miss a flight because you've checked yourself into whatever program you're pretty much guaranteed to keep your job. Show up drunk though and you'll find yourself in jail. There's an interesting discussion on an aviation forum about landing in an unapproved situation. The question was whether the response should be termination or training. Lots of folks weighed in, favoring termination. However lots of those same folks pointed out that their employers had a no-fault go around policy — as in you probably wouldn't even have to fill out paperwork for aborting a landing. Own up to whatever mistakes, go around, and land safely – nobody cares. Double down on unsafe behavior, nobody's going to want to fly with you.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  I don't think it holds up in court, however.
- lubujackson 2y ago
  Pro tip, I've gotten out of more than one speeding ticket by doing this. Trick is to make it look like an internal struggle. "Do you know why I pulled you over?" "I think I was going a little fast." "Any reason why?" "I was just-- No, officer. I'm sorry, I made a bad decision."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
helpfulContrib 2y ago
It is a very, very important lesson to learn: how to understand and acknowledge ones failings. The impulse is to defend, as failings are weakness and represent instances of unattained agency. In this day and age, agency is all you've got, most times. One feels the need to protect it at great expense. Have you ever noticed how crap it feels to over-defend something that turns out to be an abundant triviality? So, to have the wherewithal to turn those weaknesses into strengths is an extraordinary human endeavour, and a testament to the strength of human spirit. When people say that there are only material things in life, it will be interesting to consider this story where the moral principles of Captain Kohei Asoh led him to maintain his agency over his life as a pilot by protecting (superlatively), the lives of his passengers, in a material and ethical sense, and admitting the mistakes made in light of actual success. Would the 'I fucked up' conjecture feel different if he were uttering it from the ashen mess of a death bed, with far worse survivor basis behind the statement? The spirit is clearly composed of decisions, remembered for win or fail. Seems to me, a strong soul prepares for this eventuality, in perpetuity... I have to wonder if Captain Asoh was also, incidentally, a very good pilot.
pj_mukh 2y ago
" If the plane had come down in any other part of the bay, such as the 30-foot deep waters to its east or the dry flats to the west, Flight 2 would have either sunk, or likely set ablaze" Wait wait wait, plane fuselages don't naturally float? I always assumed they did?
- parl_match 2y ago
  They do for a bit...
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I doubt they are water tight, so eventually they'd fill with water. It's not like they're designed for space and need to be perfectly sealed
    - ipaddr 2y ago
      You have about 20 minutes depending on the plane and it being upright. The Hudson plane stayed up for 24 minutes.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      They're certainly not airtight. There's intentional leaks in a pressure cabin. This is used to regulate the pressure, there is constant engine bleed air flowing in. If you allow more air than it leaks out the pressure will rise, if you lower the airflow it will drop. This mechanism also takes care of refreshing the cabin air. There's also some catalytic conversion going on to remove the high ozone content that's present at high altitudes. But I think it's pretty hard to ditch a plane without damaging the fuselage to some extent.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  I mean, depends how hard you hit, and people need to get out... Water is not soft at ~150 knots; even Flight 1549 in the Hudson's perfect ditching resulted in the plane sinking when they opened the doors. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Air_Flight_1549_rescue_efforts.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Air_Flight_1549_r... In this case, the ditching wasn't really intentional (the Hudson flight knew they were going down; this one just... flew into the sea due to fog), so it could have looked more like this if they were less lucky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ditching_of_Ethiopian_Airlines_Flt_961.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ditching_of_Ethiopian_Air... Per Wiki: > Asoh later stated that he realized the plane was too low once he spotted the water after the plane broke through the fog with an air speed of 177 mi/h (285 km/h). He grabbed the control stick to gain altitude and advanced the throttles in anticipation of having to abort the landing and perform a go-around, but the plane's main landing gear had already struck the water... The Hudson flight was very challenging flying, but they did have four minutes of "we're going down", and enough time before "we're going down in the water" to do things like raise the gear.
d_silin 2y ago
"...Captain Asoh somehow managed to guide the plane onto the water and into the mud below without a single injury to the 100 adults and seven children on board, beyond a bloody nose." A+ landing: zero fatalities and your airplane can take-off again on the same day. B landing: zero fatalities.
- lisper 2y ago
  The standard joke among pilots is: if you can walk away, it was a good landing. If you can re-use the plane, it was a great landing.
  - Stratoscope 2y ago
    Then this must count as a great landing! > While everyone aboard safely went about their strange day after the crash, the plane was left with $4 million of damage, though it was fixed up and flying again less than 12 months later.
    - thfuran 2y ago
      That depends on how many ships you think Theseus has owned.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    For those of us who are not pilots, but have played with flight simulators: in case of an emergency where we have to take the controls the airplane already belongs to the insurance company, try to save your own life.
MisterTea 2y ago
> Captain Asoh was the last to leave, and returned to the plane after ensuring everyone was safely ashore to gather and return the passengers' personal belongings. > A language barrier between Captain Asoh, who spoke little English, and his American copilot, Joseph Hazen, was also partially to blame, as the pair attempted to use a new instrument landing system for the first time. But at the NTSB investigation, Asoh chose not to blame any of those factors or make any excuses. When asked what went wrong, he simply replied, “As you Americans say … I f--ked up.” Talk about being responsible for ones actions. This man is a model.
- bluGill 2y ago
  > pair attempted to use a new instrument landing system for the first time This is the real root cause: insufficient training. They should have both used the system before in training situations on a nice day when they can look out the window if they don't understand something. Unless they are test pilots for the maker of the landing system (which they were not because this was not a test situation) they should have had a qualified trainer teach them how to use the system and plenty of hours of in the simulators using this system in situations much harder than the one they encountered.
  - cozzyd 2y ago
    Did simulators exist in 1968?
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Yes. Not as good as today but they existed. They also had instructors
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    > insufficient training Indeed this is a fuck up. However I did not see it mentioned anywhere in the article that there were any training requirements in place. Perhaps both pilots assumed that the instruments would be similar to what they were used to and were confident they could read/operate it. Another thing is I don't like how the article does not mention this missing fact and the take away of Asoh's admission of guilt is a management lesson to admit mistakes. Instead, from this fact I had predicted it to be: Airline management should take responsibility for allowing two unqualified pilots to fly that aircraft. There was no process in place to ensure that pilots are qualified to fly the aircraft they are piloting full of people.
zabzonk 2y ago
"I f*cked up" is something I've had to say several times in my career as a dev. It's in the nature of things.
lazyasciiart 2y ago
It’s funny how this would simply be an unacceptable answer in a root-cause-analysis. “I fucked up” basically just means “yea, someone else might make the same mistake, nothing to be done to prevent it”.
- superfrank 2y ago
  I disagree. Most places I've worked, "I fucked up" is an acceptable response in an RCA as long as "I fucked up" isn't the end of the analysis. You shouldn't just be to throw your hands up and go, "well I guess nothing can be done then". People will fuck up, but you can do things to protect them from themselves, limit the blast radius, and make recovery smoother. From my own life, I worked at a start up early in my career and dropped the entire production database. I was troubleshooting a production bug and had the prod DB open in one terminal window and my local DB open in another. I meant to drop my local DB and instead typed it into the prod terminal and that was that. In the RCA we didn't just end at "I fucked up". The line of questioning went beyond that into what gaps allowed that fuck up to be possible which lead to action items around restricting access to production data to only those who need it as well as ensuring we had proper backups (thankfully, we did at the time) and ensuring we had runbooks on restoring data in the event that it happened again.
  - mh- 2y ago
    > [..] had the prod DB open in one terminal window and my local DB open in another. I meant to drop my local DB [..] I feel like every single one of us who has worked in this role has this same story, haha. Mine was iTerm split panes, but still. Over a decade ago and I still have my own little system I (now) adhere to ensure that never happens again.
    - alexjplant 2y ago
      I'm a big fan of shisa kanko [1] as practiced by Japanese rail workers. Every time I go to make a change to a critical system I deliberately say out loud what I'm connected to, what I'm about to do, and why I'm doing it as I confirm these assertions before taking action. If at all possible I have somebody else on the call watching. I'm sure it looks goofy to my colleagues but I'd like to think that it helps to avoid these types of mistakes. [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-japan-trains https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j...
rconti 2y ago
Unrelated other than being an airplane incident, but I recently was reading up on BOAC flight 911[1] while in Japan, and the full story about how many other air disasters occurred to Japan that year, the plane taxiing past the wreckage of the previous day's crash, passengers who were on BOTH planes, and the Albert Broccoli connection.... just crazy. Oh and I happened to be on JL2 on Friday, which thankfully landed uneventfully on the tarmac at SFO. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Those were different times though. Aviation safety has become really good especially because of all the thorough investigations and things actually getting fixed. In those days passenger jets were fairly new, there was still a lot of cowboying around in cockpits (no 10.000 foot rule, no crew management standards), there was no standard phraseology (which caused the Avianca fuel exhaustion crash). So many things have been learned.
geocrasher 2y ago
I once ran a stop sign, and nearly hit a car. They pulled up next to me, rolled down their window (I had stopped at my home) and were about to unleash who knows what kinds of profanities at me, and I just said "That was totally my fault. I didn't see the stop sign. I'm sorry." They stopped dead in their tracks, shrugged and nodded, and left. Owning mistakes is an extremely powerful tool when used correctly.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  I really wish this wasn't the shocking revelation it is, but holy fuck, a ton of people just refuse to do this. I've done it all my life, personal and professional. I will (not happily, but I will) explain how I fucked up, and why. But similar to your experience, this catches people completely off guard. They don't expect it and I know why, because in my interactions in turn with people who also, categorically, fucked up: they will NEVER admit it. Most people will die on the hill of not just owning a simple fucking mistake and it's so bonkers to witness. Like... it's fine. You're human. You made a human error. Just like... acknowledge it so we can get on with whatever?
  - jaredhallen 2y ago
    Heck, I'll do it happily. I don't enjoy screwing up, but owning your mistakes is the first step to improvement.
  - feurio 2y ago
    I can't think of many better ways to demonstrate to your colleagues and corporate overlords that you are worthy of their trust than to readily hold up your hands if you've screwed up. So long as you're not so incompetent that you're repeatedly doing stupid stuff or cynically causing issues so that you can make yourself look virtuous by owning up, of course.
    - ricksunny 2y ago
      In corporate context, admitting exernally-facing liability too easily violates executives' fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. For incentives aligning, need to figure out how to unravel that beasty.
amelius 2y ago
> While everyone aboard safely went about their strange day after the crash, the plane was left with $4 million of damage, though it was fixed up and flying again less than 12 months later. Crazy times.
rafram 2y ago
The copilot had an interesting life [1]. He flew for the CIA during the US’s unacknowledged war in Laos. [1]: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/joseph-hazen-obituary?id=13282014 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/josep...
23B1 2y ago
This works when you are dealing with an organization that is run by sensible and wise people who are focused on building a better organization by building better people This does not work in places where you are a number, or a cog, or readily replaceable.
paulorlando 2y ago
I learned about this while growing up after hearing Jerry Harvey talk about it (mentioned in the article). I actually used to keep a picture of the pilot with the words "we salute you" as a reminder of how to handle mistakes. No one ever got the connection.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]

110 points by Stratoscope 2y ago

This was the interesting part for me: > When asked what went wrong, he simply replied, “As you Americans say … I f--ked up.” > Captain Asoh’s frankness and self deprecation helped him preserve his career. Rather than get fired, as was expected, the airline merely demoted him to copilot, before allowing him to work his way back up to captain a few years later. He went on to captain hundreds more flights, all of which landed successfully. > The “I f--ked up” reasoning, or what became more eloquently known in legal circles as “The Asoh Defense” is used to prove that sometimes a frank admission of guilt is the easiest way out of a pickle.

ceejayoz 2y ago
Reminds me of a case in healthcare, where a hospital found genuine apologies were way more effective than stonewalling to try and avoid liability. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/saying-sorry-pays-u-s-doctors-flna1c9457761 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/saying-sorry-pays... > When a treatment goes wrong at a U.S. hospital, fear of a lawsuit usually means “never daring to say you’re sorry.” > That’s not the way it works at the University of Michigan Health System, where lawyers and doctors say admitting mistakes up front and offering compensation before being sued have brought about remarkable savings in money, time and feelings.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  But they have to be genuine, not "We found the button to press to get the best result."
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    Plenty of people can fake genuineness. It doesn't have to be genuine to be effective, it just has to be well received.
    - HarryHirsch 2y ago
      Once a sufficient number of people have peed in the pool the strategy fails to work: this physician is incompetent and dug in, that physician is incompetent and dug in, another physician who is incompetent and refuses to own up, and here's one who is incompetent and pretends to be sorry.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      In many Islamic justice systems, there is an option for the offender to pay money to the victim to reduce penalty. I think there are many cases where this could work in a non-Islamic culture, but many people are afraid that "rich people can buy their way out of trouble". There is some truth to it, but the victim may feel the outcome is better after payment.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Joel Spolsky wrote about this roughly 20 years ago on JoelOnSoftware. IIRC, he hired a locksmith to copy a key and the key didn't work. After the third (and likely final, because of how irritated he was getting) try going back to the shop, the locksmith took a closer look at it and said, "I'm sorry, I see where I went wrong." Instantly, situation defused from major annoyance to "OK, this guy just made a mistake, I'll try it again."
- astura 2y ago
  This book - https://www.amazon.com/Sorry-Case-Good-Apologies/dp/1982163496 https://www.amazon.com/Sorry-Case-Good-Apologies/dp/19821634... - has an entire chapter dedicated to this.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Hmm yeah but the US legal system is kinda out of control with ridiculous claims and damages granted. If you're going to bankrupt a doctor, it becomes much harder for them to tell the truth.
  - michaelmrose 2y ago
    Can you substantiate this claim?
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  The problem in the US: Accepting guilt may open you to gross negligence with can incur triple damages. As a result most bog standard legal advice in US tells companies to never admit fault when sued. It would be nice to carve out some kind of exception a genuine apology.
- ilikepi 2y ago
  There was also a Radiolab episode that discussed this idea at a different hospital... https://radiolab.org/podcast/apologetical-2303 https://radiolab.org/podcast/apologetical-2303
_yb2s 2y ago
I wish more people knew this… it actually works amazing. Taking responsibility for your mistakes and, better yet, explaining exactly what went wrong and how you will prevent it in the future almost always turns out better, and builds more respect and trust than trying to deny or shift the blame as is usually done. Learning this radically improved my career progression, and personal relationships. It also takes the power away from people that would use it to manipulate or control you.
- matwood 2y ago
  It's important to note what you're describing is taking real ownership of your screw ups. Like you said, that means doing what you can fix them and prevent them from happening again. Simply saying 'that's on me' and doing nothing to change isn't what's meant here. And yes, I have done this my whole career and it works.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    Good point- I often see, especially in corporate press releases about security incidents, etc. an apology (often without even directly saying they are responsible- or with a company but no actual individual people taking responsibility), but then no explanation of what they are actually changing to fix the problem. Or there will be a “designated fall guy” who was not personally involved but is apparently paid with a prearranged “golden parachute” to resign and take the blame, which is just a deflection strategy to avoid actually taking responsibility while appearing to do so.
- inferiorhuman 2y ago
  That works for American aviation because there's a strong culture of avoiding blame. Instead of taking punitive action the usual course is to look for a root cause and how to avoid it. That extends as far as drug/alcohol use where if you miss a flight because you've checked yourself into whatever program you're pretty much guaranteed to keep your job. Show up drunk though and you'll find yourself in jail. There's an interesting discussion on an aviation forum about landing in an unapproved situation. The question was whether the response should be termination or training. Lots of folks weighed in, favoring termination. However lots of those same folks pointed out that their employers had a no-fault go around policy — as in you probably wouldn't even have to fill out paperwork for aborting a landing. Own up to whatever mistakes, go around, and land safely – nobody cares. Double down on unsafe behavior, nobody's going to want to fly with you.
johnisgood 2y ago
I don't think it holds up in court, however.
lubujackson 2y ago
Pro tip, I've gotten out of more than one speeding ticket by doing this. Trick is to make it look like an internal struggle. "Do you know why I pulled you over?" "I think I was going a little fast." "Any reason why?" "I was just-- No, officer. I'm sorry, I made a bad decision."

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

helpfulContrib 2y ago

It is a very, very important lesson to learn: how to understand and acknowledge ones failings. The impulse is to defend, as failings are weakness and represent instances of unattained agency. In this day and age, agency is all you've got, most times. One feels the need to protect it at great expense. Have you ever noticed how crap it feels to over-defend something that turns out to be an abundant triviality? So, to have the wherewithal to turn those weaknesses into strengths is an extraordinary human endeavour, and a testament to the strength of human spirit. When people say that there are only material things in life, it will be interesting to consider this story where the moral principles of Captain Kohei Asoh led him to maintain his agency over his life as a pilot by protecting (superlatively), the lives of his passengers, in a material and ethical sense, and admitting the mistakes made in light of actual success. Would the 'I fucked up' conjecture feel different if he were uttering it from the ashen mess of a death bed, with far worse survivor basis behind the statement? The spirit is clearly composed of decisions, remembered for win or fail. Seems to me, a strong soul prepares for this eventuality, in perpetuity... I have to wonder if Captain Asoh was also, incidentally, a very good pilot.

pj_mukh 2y ago

" If the plane had come down in any other part of the bay, such as the 30-foot deep waters to its east or the dry flats to the west, Flight 2 would have either sunk, or likely set ablaze" Wait wait wait, plane fuselages don't naturally float? I always assumed they did?

parl_match 2y ago
They do for a bit...
- dylan604 2y ago
  I doubt they are water tight, so eventually they'd fill with water. It's not like they're designed for space and need to be perfectly sealed
  - ipaddr 2y ago
    You have about 20 minutes depending on the plane and it being upright. The Hudson plane stayed up for 24 minutes.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    They're certainly not airtight. There's intentional leaks in a pressure cabin. This is used to regulate the pressure, there is constant engine bleed air flowing in. If you allow more air than it leaks out the pressure will rise, if you lower the airflow it will drop. This mechanism also takes care of refreshing the cabin air. There's also some catalytic conversion going on to remove the high ozone content that's present at high altitudes. But I think it's pretty hard to ditch a plane without damaging the fuselage to some extent.
ceejayoz 2y ago
I mean, depends how hard you hit, and people need to get out... Water is not soft at ~150 knots; even Flight 1549 in the Hudson's perfect ditching resulted in the plane sinking when they opened the doors. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Air_Flight_1549_rescue_efforts.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Air_Flight_1549_r... In this case, the ditching wasn't really intentional (the Hudson flight knew they were going down; this one just... flew into the sea due to fog), so it could have looked more like this if they were less lucky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ditching_of_Ethiopian_Airlines_Flt_961.JPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ditching_of_Ethiopian_Air... Per Wiki: > Asoh later stated that he realized the plane was too low once he spotted the water after the plane broke through the fog with an air speed of 177 mi/h (285 km/h). He grabbed the control stick to gain altitude and advanced the throttles in anticipation of having to abort the landing and perform a go-around, but the plane's main landing gear had already struck the water... The Hudson flight was very challenging flying, but they did have four minutes of "we're going down", and enough time before "we're going down in the water" to do things like raise the gear.

d_silin 2y ago

"...Captain Asoh somehow managed to guide the plane onto the water and into the mud below without a single injury to the 100 adults and seven children on board, beyond a bloody nose." A+ landing: zero fatalities and your airplane can take-off again on the same day. B landing: zero fatalities.

lisper 2y ago
The standard joke among pilots is: if you can walk away, it was a good landing. If you can re-use the plane, it was a great landing.
- Stratoscope 2y ago
  Then this must count as a great landing! > While everyone aboard safely went about their strange day after the crash, the plane was left with $4 million of damage, though it was fixed up and flying again less than 12 months later.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    That depends on how many ships you think Theseus has owned.
- bluGill 2y ago
  For those of us who are not pilots, but have played with flight simulators: in case of an emergency where we have to take the controls the airplane already belongs to the insurance company, try to save your own life.

MisterTea 2y ago

> Captain Asoh was the last to leave, and returned to the plane after ensuring everyone was safely ashore to gather and return the passengers' personal belongings. > A language barrier between Captain Asoh, who spoke little English, and his American copilot, Joseph Hazen, was also partially to blame, as the pair attempted to use a new instrument landing system for the first time. But at the NTSB investigation, Asoh chose not to blame any of those factors or make any excuses. When asked what went wrong, he simply replied, “As you Americans say … I f--ked up.” Talk about being responsible for ones actions. This man is a model.

bluGill 2y ago
> pair attempted to use a new instrument landing system for the first time This is the real root cause: insufficient training. They should have both used the system before in training situations on a nice day when they can look out the window if they don't understand something. Unless they are test pilots for the maker of the landing system (which they were not because this was not a test situation) they should have had a qualified trainer teach them how to use the system and plenty of hours of in the simulators using this system in situations much harder than the one they encountered.
- cozzyd 2y ago
  Did simulators exist in 1968?
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Yes. Not as good as today but they existed. They also had instructors
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > insufficient training Indeed this is a fuck up. However I did not see it mentioned anywhere in the article that there were any training requirements in place. Perhaps both pilots assumed that the instruments would be similar to what they were used to and were confident they could read/operate it. Another thing is I don't like how the article does not mention this missing fact and the take away of Asoh's admission of guilt is a management lesson to admit mistakes. Instead, from this fact I had predicted it to be: Airline management should take responsibility for allowing two unqualified pilots to fly that aircraft. There was no process in place to ensure that pilots are qualified to fly the aircraft they are piloting full of people.

zabzonk 2y ago

"I f*cked up" is something I've had to say several times in my career as a dev. It's in the nature of things.

lazyasciiart 2y ago

It’s funny how this would simply be an unacceptable answer in a root-cause-analysis. “I fucked up” basically just means “yea, someone else might make the same mistake, nothing to be done to prevent it”.

superfrank 2y ago
I disagree. Most places I've worked, "I fucked up" is an acceptable response in an RCA as long as "I fucked up" isn't the end of the analysis. You shouldn't just be to throw your hands up and go, "well I guess nothing can be done then". People will fuck up, but you can do things to protect them from themselves, limit the blast radius, and make recovery smoother. From my own life, I worked at a start up early in my career and dropped the entire production database. I was troubleshooting a production bug and had the prod DB open in one terminal window and my local DB open in another. I meant to drop my local DB and instead typed it into the prod terminal and that was that. In the RCA we didn't just end at "I fucked up". The line of questioning went beyond that into what gaps allowed that fuck up to be possible which lead to action items around restricting access to production data to only those who need it as well as ensuring we had proper backups (thankfully, we did at the time) and ensuring we had runbooks on restoring data in the event that it happened again.
- mh- 2y ago
  > [..] had the prod DB open in one terminal window and my local DB open in another. I meant to drop my local DB [..] I feel like every single one of us who has worked in this role has this same story, haha. Mine was iTerm split panes, but still. Over a decade ago and I still have my own little system I (now) adhere to ensure that never happens again.
  - alexjplant 2y ago
    I'm a big fan of shisa kanko [1] as practiced by Japanese rail workers. Every time I go to make a change to a critical system I deliberately say out loud what I'm connected to, what I'm about to do, and why I'm doing it as I confirm these assertions before taking action. If at all possible I have somebody else on the call watching. I'm sure it looks goofy to my colleagues but I'd like to think that it helps to avoid these types of mistakes. [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-japan-trains https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j...

rconti 2y ago

Unrelated other than being an airplane incident, but I recently was reading up on BOAC flight 911[1] while in Japan, and the full story about how many other air disasters occurred to Japan that year, the plane taxiing past the wreckage of the previous day's crash, passengers who were on BOTH planes, and the Albert Broccoli connection.... just crazy. Oh and I happened to be on JL2 on Friday, which thankfully landed uneventfully on the tarmac at SFO. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911

wkat4242 2y ago
Those were different times though. Aviation safety has become really good especially because of all the thorough investigations and things actually getting fixed. In those days passenger jets were fairly new, there was still a lot of cowboying around in cockpits (no 10.000 foot rule, no crew management standards), there was no standard phraseology (which caused the Avianca fuel exhaustion crash). So many things have been learned.

geocrasher 2y ago

I once ran a stop sign, and nearly hit a car. They pulled up next to me, rolled down their window (I had stopped at my home) and were about to unleash who knows what kinds of profanities at me, and I just said "That was totally my fault. I didn't see the stop sign. I'm sorry." They stopped dead in their tracks, shrugged and nodded, and left. Owning mistakes is an extremely powerful tool when used correctly.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
I really wish this wasn't the shocking revelation it is, but holy fuck, a ton of people just refuse to do this. I've done it all my life, personal and professional. I will (not happily, but I will) explain how I fucked up, and why. But similar to your experience, this catches people completely off guard. They don't expect it and I know why, because in my interactions in turn with people who also, categorically, fucked up: they will NEVER admit it. Most people will die on the hill of not just owning a simple fucking mistake and it's so bonkers to witness. Like... it's fine. You're human. You made a human error. Just like... acknowledge it so we can get on with whatever?
- jaredhallen 2y ago
  Heck, I'll do it happily. I don't enjoy screwing up, but owning your mistakes is the first step to improvement.
- feurio 2y ago
  I can't think of many better ways to demonstrate to your colleagues and corporate overlords that you are worthy of their trust than to readily hold up your hands if you've screwed up. So long as you're not so incompetent that you're repeatedly doing stupid stuff or cynically causing issues so that you can make yourself look virtuous by owning up, of course.
  - ricksunny 2y ago
    In corporate context, admitting exernally-facing liability too easily violates executives' fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. For incentives aligning, need to figure out how to unravel that beasty.

amelius 2y ago

> While everyone aboard safely went about their strange day after the crash, the plane was left with $4 million of damage, though it was fixed up and flying again less than 12 months later. Crazy times.

rafram 2y ago

The copilot had an interesting life [1]. He flew for the CIA during the US’s unacknowledged war in Laos. [1]: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/joseph-hazen-obituary?id=13282014 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/josep...

23B1 2y ago

This works when you are dealing with an organization that is run by sensible and wise people who are focused on building a better organization by building better people This does not work in places where you are a number, or a cog, or readily replaceable.

paulorlando 2y ago

I learned about this while growing up after hearing Jerry Harvey talk about it (mentioned in the article). I actually used to keep a picture of the pilot with the words "we salute you" as a reminder of how to handle mistakes. No one ever got the connection.

aaron695 2y ago

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