Why Investigators Fear the Two Boeing 737s Crashed for Similar Reasons

Meanwhile the Russians, who have significantly more experience with airliners, released the SSJ-100 to fairly positive reviews. Unfortunately the after sales support was trash and airlines struggled to keep it flying. Selling a competitive airplane is far more than just the plane itself. There's no way Airbus or Boeing see Comac as a threat.

The real threat was Bombardier. Their C-series was an extremely competitive offering and Bombardier has the support infrastructure in place to sell it. Both Swiss and airBaltic seem to love it. Of course, Airbus bought a majority stake in the program.

Although, truth be told, I imagine every 737 pilot is keenly aware of that button's location now...

So now you have an aeroplane with its flaps ripped off, perhaps asymmetrically for additional control challenges. Next step?

No, it is what you normally find in laws. Doctors who perform poorly at their job are liable. Engineers who disregard basic safety measures established for decades (such as sensor redundancy) should be too (or the managers that approved the cost cut to not include redundancy).

It’s insane. There must be some despondent folks at the FAA right now. Years of trust squandered.

Seems like not everything was built to spec

Making decisions based on fear is a fools errand. It is how you spend trillions of dollars waging wars combating terrorism when the risk of a terror related death is the US is lower than getting struck by lightening.

The second space shuttle crash was the same problem again. Falling chunks of ice and foam. Since nothing major had happened previously, it was assumed everything would be fine.

These failure and problems were the warning signs that something was wrong. There was no design spec for acceptable o-ring burn through or a leading edge heat shield damage threshold spec.

I bet we will find that Boeing and the FAA talked themselves into believing that

“Data released by the Sweden-based service suggested the aircraft had climbed almost 1,000 feet after taking off from Addis Ababa, a hot and high-altitude airport whose thinner air requires extra effort from an aircraft's engines.” https://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFKBN1QR07Z

But no doubt they would be flight testing the reputed MCAS changes at this time so it’s a reasonable guess.

The actual time to reach 6 km was around 6.5 minutes in the "typical flight" and around 5 minutes in the "test flight", as can be seen by scaling both graphs to the same proportions. (I've done it quickly with Paint here: https://i.imgur.com/IZyYoCl.png)

Is that 1.5 minute difference really that high? Honest question, I really don't know anything about this topic.

EDIT: Sorry, this should have been a reply to @rkagerer's comment.

I don’t understand this ridiculous burden we place on our politicians. Why can’t they change their opinion on things when new facts come to light? I am not saying changing principles but opinions.

Like someone asked “I see new facts and change my opinion. What do you do?”

My favorite-thing about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect is that the coiner of the term himself, in the very speech where he coined the term, fell victim to that effect.

To Michael Crichton's great credit, in the 2002 talk where he defines the term, he gives us an extremely specific, testable hypothesis we can use to evaluate his idea.

He says that the "effect" is as follows: it is not worth your time to read the newspaper and all newspaper stories which contain any kind of "speculation" or "predicting" have no predictive value.

The example he chooses is the 2002 United States steel tariffs. Most mainstream newspapers he reads have quoted experts whose consensus is that the then-contemporary 2002 tariffs will negatively affect GDP. His hypothesis is as follows: we will find in retrospect that these predictions were useless and US GDP will not clearly be damaged by the 2002 tariffs.

Was he right? Well... Years later, there is consensus among experts that US GDP was in fact negatively affected by 2002 steel tariffs (links to sources at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tarif... ).

Driven to attack the idea of trusting any experts who predict the future, Crichton's key example was readily disproven.

I have often re-read Crichton's talk and have found myself wanting to project extra layers of meaning on top of his ideas; I find myself arguing on his behalf to try to change what he is saying to make it "more true". The words he uses are carefully chosen and seem like they add up to an interesting idea.

It is true that people seem to believe information without factual basis when it's presented in the "news" format; it's also true that people seem to believe opinions they already agree with when presented to them in any format; and it is certainly true that people asked to make predictions with incomplete information sometimes guess wrong, yet their "best guess" predictions are sometimes presented without robust explanations of the uncertainty and what it means.

All that is true. But it doesn't change the fact that the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" was introduced by saying that the untrustworthy lamestream media needs to stop yammering already about those steel tariffs hurting GDP, which there is no way they could predict. (It appears the media was right on that one.) Worse than relying on anecdata, though, his talk does not propose a robust way of actually measuring whether media predictions are accurate -- he doesn't even try to measure that, let alone present results.

(I have giggled at this before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005236 )

Yesterday it was just an overload because we must have had a half dozen 737MAX threads in the previous 24 hours. And the quality of the commentary was going down, not up, as time went on.

Totally agree with your advice to keep in mind that this applies to all topics. A little part of me keeps whispering that I should avoid looking at the comments altogether. I rationalize that on HN I am getting good quality commentary and the first few contrary arguments will help me see the article/news/whatever in an objective light, but then I totally get sucked in.