Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

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But the next crew has been told to configure the system properly many many many times (training, checklists, recurrent training). Telling them once more won’t achieve anything. On the other hand, telling previous crews not to set it wrong might achieve something, removing one failure mode and adding another level of redundancy.

The ghastly Helios accident [1] was also triggered by a misconfiguration (by maintenance staff). Sure, you’ll tell the pilots again to actually run their checklists, but you’ll also tell the maintenance crew not to screw up the standard settings.

Counterpoint: if you have a checklist item, and it is always in the desired/expected configuration already, you might start to skip it (with the concomitant consequences if one day it isn’t).

Maybe flight crews/maintenance staff should configure the machine randomly after a flight/maintenance, so as to force the next crew to actually run the checklist carefully?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

Is there no functionality to reset the computer between flights? It seems insane that the first item in the checklist isn't "press the reset button". And the computer shouldn't let the aircraft take off if some required setting hasn't been set. Imagine if you were on an e-commerce website and you had to delete the previous customer's billing details before checking out!

This would take substantial time.

Would you manually reinstall and reconfigure your workstation every morning?

Manually reconfiguring is what happens today. What I'm suggesting is to reset to a known good state.

Some settings should clearly start as blank and be required. Other settings could start as as a default value (defined by the airline) and the pilots would merely have to confirm that it is correct, or deviate from it.

The point is, we can do a lot better UI-wise than just reusing the settings from the previous flight, and with a little thought put into it the configuration process could be both safer and faster.

There are checklists for configuring everything as required.

And as we just learned, people make mistakes or skip steps when following those, so maybe the button would be better.

Maybe flight crews/maintenance staff should configure the machine randomly after a flight/maintenance, so as to force the next crew to actually run the checklist carefully?

This reminds me a little of Adam Langley's advice for keeping software protocol extensibility points well-oiled:

You might want to define and implement dummy extensions once a year or such, and retire old ones on a similar schedule. When extensions contain lists of values, define a range of values that clients insert at random. (https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/05/16/agility.html)

Reminds me of a pistol class I once took. The instructor said he didn't believe in using the physical safety, because people tended to use it as a crutch to ignore other safety measures.

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