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Comment by pellucidar | Hacker News Reader

Pilot error can be (and apparently was) a factor, no matter how at fault Boeing also was, and no matter how understandable the errors may have been under the circumstances. The Lion Air Pilots did not follow the trim procedures that had saved the prior flight, and the Ethiopian pilots didn’t keep their speed under control, among other things.

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Didn’t we just have an article yesterday on how difficult it is to recover from this event in a simulator, in which the pilots knew exactly what was wrong and what was going to happen.

Blaming the Ethiopian pilots (One of the safest airlines in the world btw) for getting over speed during the workload induced by runaway trim is disrespectful.

By now, near every professional pilot agrees that these are near unrecoverable events unless you assess and cut the trim in first 15 seconds or so.

Blaming Lion Air in the first hours after the crash, with their somewhat sketchy history, was understandable.

Everything after that is uninformed or racist.

Racist? The Ethiopian copilot had less than 300 hours total time. In the US, 1500 hours is required. Lion Air’s history of deficient processes is also not a function of race. Pilot standards are much lower in other non-American/non-European countries.

The fact that the US flies more and has fewer accidents isn’t “racist” nor lucky.

What is Racist is that Boeing is using perceptions about foreign airlines to shift blame and scapegoat... when clearly Boeing was the party trading safety for profit here. Boeing, "the Americans", knew and did nothing. There is no evidence that more flight time or experience would have changed the outcome. Who has 5,000 hrs of MCAS fuck up protocol? Sometimes those with less experience handle new technology better.

I doubt it was racism when regular American (and Western) chauvinism is plenty to do the job of discrediting a third-world airline--not to mention that most Americans couldn't tell you what race Indonesians are.

Getting over speed is an understandable error, and it's neither disrespectful nor racist to mention it as an error when discussing whether pilot error occurred.

Lion Air as such deserves blame for putting a broken plane back into the air; that's a bigger "third world factor" than pilot error, but it doesn't remove all pilot error from the flight.

The industry has stopped blaming things on "pilot error". It's not constructive, and in 90% of the cases it is the wrong conclusion. That in itself is dangerous because it means you stop looking for the real cause and ways to prevent it in the future.

The current view is that a mistake by the pilots can not be allowed to bring a plane down. If it does, the plane, software or procedures are designed wrong. And from my experience the industry (at least in Western Europe where I fly) really lives by this.

I don't represent the industry; I was just responding to a comment about pilot error. I was taking it as a given that we already know the ultimate cause was bad software. But that bad software didn't crash the planes every time, only under certain conditions, and after certain pilot actions or inactions.

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