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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>Forget about the deck crew and the pilot being blind morons.

I thought aviation is THE industry that runs on procedures and checklists you need to tick before and after each flight to make sure the even if you're a complete klutz, nothing like this can ever happen. Did that go out the window?

>It means the flight computer for a plane that took twenty years and a trillion dollars to develop can't detect that there's a fucking cover blocking the engine.

This is pure gold. Even my robovac can detect when something is chocking the suction intake and shut down and send me a notification on my phone. The fact that a trillion dollar weapon missed this feature is hilarious.

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The article says that this was a checklist item for both the ground crew and the pilot, and yet it wasn't spotted/fixed (did they even conduct the checks?). Multiple heads are definitely going to roll on this one.

But two things can be true:

- Procedures/checklists should have stopped this (and should be the primary way).

- The flight computer should know that air flowing into the engine is unusual when a cover is blocking it.

Also keep in mind that if both are fixed, this would be fixes from two different organizations (the British Navy and Lockheed Martin/F-35B's manufacturing chain).

This happened at peace time. I can imagine during a stressful wartime situation human error is more likely to occur, which is even more reason why computer sanity checks can be advantageous.

>The article says that this was a checklist item for both the ground crew and the pilot, and yet it wasn't spotted/fixed (did they even conduct the checks?). Multiple heads are definitely going to roll on this one.

As it should be. If you're just ticking boxes on a checklist of a weapons system responsible for life and death situations, without actually performing said checks, you shouldn't be entrusted with this job. This is beyond incompetence.

It depends on how the checklist was structured/phrased though doesn’t it?

“Check for rain cover” isn’t as clear as “Remove rain cover from engine and stow in compartment labeled ‘Rain Cover’.”

In all fairness, Lockheed Martin made the cover bright red.

"Remove before flight" items often also have a long red streamer attached.

One possible engineering solution would be to make the cover out of a material strong enough to keep out the weather, but flimsy enough that if the engine was running it would suck it in and harmlessly shred/burn it.

It is non-excusible.

It is bloody red cover, sorry for the British f word. Just look ! It is strange to have that red thing.

Head rolling needed. Life and death in fighting situation.

Having said all that may be we should have that to baby sit these pilot. And ground crew.

Well, the British f-word is just that.

There are a ton of ways that checklists can fail. For instance, when an item is 2x instead of separate items for left and right. When items are done in a series instead of one at a time. When time constraints force a rush. When items aren't read aloud. When checklists aren't completed. When those responsible for completing the items aren't present for the checks. When no one is following behind double checking each item.

There is a whole science behind checklists like this. Surgeons have been learning this lesson for over a decade now: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2015/08/04/checklist...

Also it is possible that the cover did not restrict air flow until the aircraft entered a cruise flight regime or a certain altitude. Often aircraft will have different intake bypasses for different flight regimes. However, a cover like this SHOULD have a pin and momentary switch similar to lockouts for flight controls. But if the cover was an afterthought, implemented by crews and not the engineers, that may not have been accounted for.

Things can get complicated when checklists have if-else-branches and loops.

Anything that has a list of lists, and if-else-branches can be really hard to get right. You walk into one wrong branch due to human error, mistakes just multiply from there.

Also the worse thing is- you are confident that you are doing the right thing, while just making more mistakes.

Don't forget checklist and alarm fatigue. When an alarm goes off every 2 seconds "Check air intake" because of changes in atmospheric pressure etc... When a checklist is 200 items long and your commander is asking why you aren't in the air yet. Organizational failure, when every other pilot in the wing is waiting to taxi because they skimmed the checklist and you are still checking freeze plugs and fuel.

Anyone in charge of this sort of mission critical stuff has to be willing to take it on the chin to ensure safety. If top brass isn't willing to take "safety" as an excuse for a delay or cancellation it's just going to propagate down and cause an accident.

yup any repeated interruption is indistinguishable from noise, and after a while you are just used to neglecting it.

> Also it is possible that the cover did not restrict air flow until the aircraft entered a cruise flight regime or a certain altitude

Article states that the pilot attempted to abort takeoff, but ran out of runway on the ship. So, apparently the pilot knew something was wrong pretty soon after initiating takeoff.

edit: grammar

The aircraft was doing a VTOL take off. Maybe the upwards part went fine until it was required to start shifting forward?

It wasn't doing a vertical take off. It accelerates along the flight deck and uses the ski-jump at the bow to help it get airborne.

For STOL usually the vertical take off fan is running until enough transitional lift is acquired.

The Air Force had so much trouble with pilots attempting to land without lowering the landing gear (and it was on the checklist) that during flight ops an officer was stationed at the end of the runway whose sole job was to check each landing airplane having the landing gear lowered.

Looking at the picture that cover is hardly what I'd call signal yellow. I can imagine that on a dull day, at the end of a long shift, your brain could play some funny tricks with you causing you not to see them.

It boggles my mind they wouldn't have put some kind of NFC chips in it at least to chime an alert "check intake cover".

It also is truly strange it couldn't detect the airflow anomaly on spool up, and at least alert the pilot / launch officers.

Could have a pattern embedded for super easy image recognition and a simple computer running continuous recognition of aircraft taking off (I'm sure there's cctv)... There's just so many ways to help prevent such a mistake!

I don't envy the crew explaining this.

> I thought aviation is THE industry that runs on procedures and checklists

It is, but people sometimes get complacent and/or cocky and "dog" a checklist (run through each item without actually doing it). Incredibly dangerous, inexcusable behavior. I can think of two recent fatal accidents just off the top of my head that were missed takeoff items. I've personally seen pilots say flaps twenty out loud and then go right to the next item without even looking up. Meanwhile I'm looking right at the flap lever and it's set to zero. Don't get me wrong, I get it - when something goes right 1,000 times in a row, it can be hard to get your brain to really, truly understand that the success of this takeoff has absolutely no connection to any of the previous takeoffs. But overcoming that is part of the job.

>>I thought aviation is THE industry that runs on procedures and checklists you need to tick before and after each flight to make sure the even if you're a complete klutz, nothing like this can ever happen. Did that go out the window?

Just a day back they dropped a $10 billion(20 years in development) origami transformer-like robot telescope(jwst) on the floor because some one forgot to secure a clamp well enough to hold the piece in place.

So I'm guessing regardless of whatever people say about six sigmas, checklists and procedures, human errors just continue to happen regardless.

Something similar happened with a NOAA satellite in 2003.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1783/was-the-noaa-...

>Even my robovac can detect when something is chocking the suction intake and shut down

I'm not sure I want my plane to just shut down if it ingests something.

And robovacs don't need to keep their motor running since they're not airborne so why the odd comparison? Obviously they both should react differently to intake blockage, my point was that even consumer devices have such detection features.

I do, if it's still on the ground when it happens.

I get your point, but no you don’t on an aircraft like this.

If you are on a takeoff roll with a heavily fueled and armed aircraft and it detects an ingestion it has no idea if running until it blows up will save lives or not. The pilot needs to make that call.

There are significant failures here, but without being on the scene or seeing the write up I can’t say what they are beyond the failure of both the ground crew and the pilot.

This is speaking as a 21 year Naval Aviation Senior Enlisted who has spent plenty of time on the flight deck.

I dont think the commenter above actually meant "shut down when not all is ideal". But having the aircraft scream at pilot that the airflow is unusual, possibly even suggest that it looks like as if the cover was on, and letting pilot decide whether to ignore this warning or act upon it....

Yea, I think the hard stop of my vacuum is fitting for its purpose: at worst my floor wont get vacuumed if its false error. But the aircraft lacking elevated and more concretely descriptive warnings about such crucial part of its powerplant is just wrong.

The cover was left on. You don't believe there's a moment between the plane being turned off and still and the plane moving too fast to stop where the computer should've said "what the fuck?" like, say, half a second after turning the engine on?

Aviation is the industry of procedures and checklists because it is more and more complex, never simpler. The complexity at some point is so big, people just start taking shortcuts, especially when they believe their experience will help them cutting corners.

Also aviation is not special in any way when it comes to human error. I know details never published about aircraft accidents in my country (pilots talk on the airfield, it helps us knowing what happened and what to avoid) and most were incredibly stupid human errors. I know people who crashed more than once with planes and kept doing stupid things, I personally know 4 people that crashed planes, one of them 3 times, and keep doing it. Pilots are not special, not even above average, and they keep doing things that are not expected. Being tired, bored or distracted makes it worse.

For the one who crashed 3x, what were the causes?

First time, skipping a maintenance task causing an expected problem (so it is not a technical problem). Second time, doing a risky maneuver he was not capable of doing properly in a plane perfectly capable, but he had very few hours on that type. The third time was recent, we did not meet since so I have no info yet.

Carrier runways use a slingshot to launch aircraft, it's not an unaided takeoff, the runway is not long enough to develop sufficient airspeed to take off on engine power alone. By the time the engine reports a lack of airflow in the intake, it might already be too late.

That carrier lacks a catapult.

It's a ski jump, the plane only needs a short roll.

The UK's carriers are "ski-jump" type, with no catapult. But for either type, the engine will typically be "run up" to full power before the aircraft starts moving.

There is always a nonzero error rate and always an error that never occurred for anybody to check for.

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