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The car equivalent is being on a highway and "mistakenly" pulling the hand brakes, except that there are 2 hand brakes and you need to first unlock both of them
by epolanski 1y ago
The car equivalent is being on a highway and "mistakenly" pulling the hand brakes, except that there are 2 hand brakes and you need to first unlock both of them.
That's very hard to do by panic and mistake, if not impossible by design.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoBad analogy because pilots are trained and rehearse and practice memory items until they are instinctual. > impossible by design. Deflecting that the human is the weakest part of the system. One or other may have panicked and made a mistake, made a mistake unintentionally, went crazy and doomed the flight, or intentionally doomed the flight for some socioeconomic reasons. These are speculative possibilities that we don't know yet, and may never know; we only know what has definitely happened from the evidence per the investigation. It's standing way out over one's feet to declare from an armchair that it was "definitely" X or Y before the investigation is complete.
- epolanski 1y agoForget my words then and take those from aviation experts. The fact that a pilot would cut off fuel from both engines, in sequence while taking off is virtually impossible to happen unless deliberate. Hence the hand brake comparison, it does not come natural to use it while driving.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoIt was done. Yes. There is no way to determine from the evidence why it was done, how much conscious or not thought was put into it, or the thought process behind it.
- shawabawa3 1y agoBare in mind there have been there have been what, 100+ million flights? so "virtually impossible" things can, and will happen
- yread 1y agoOn pprune there is a professional pilot that says they had multiple instances of inadverent switching off fuel switches. They do it every startup, shutdown and training captains (the captain on this flight was pilot not flying, he had >10k hours) do it all the time in the sim to trigger engine out scenario during training
- afro88 1y agoI pull my handbrake every time I park my car, but never mistake it for the windshield wiper while the car is moving
- yread 1y agoThere is no shortage of people who press the wrong pedal or button in a car or elsewhere. But of course it could never happen to you, you're special!
- afro88 1y agoYou moved the goalposts from "do something catastrophic by doing something completely unrelated to what you were trying to do" to "press the wrong pedal or button in a car or elsewhere" We're talking about taking an action in a different place in the cockpit controls that has safeties built in to prevent accidental use... like pulling a handbrake by accident while the car is moving when you meant to put your wipers on
- Emdeha2357 1y agoNope, I strongly disagree with that comparison. One doesn't need to pull up a big stick in hand using elbow and shoulder to flip this fuel switch _down_. Would a car's hand brake stop your engine if it's thumb-push-button lock failed silently and you happen to let something fall on it, like a hand? no. But this little fuel switch would.