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Comment by woliveirajr | Hacker News Reader

> "Of course, the reason was because First Officer Ryan had set both thrust levers to idle, and because of the control handover, no one pushed them back up again."

> "In fact, with both engines at idle, the asymmetric thrust had disappeared, and it was trivial to keep the plane straight and level."

> "First Officer Ryan even seemingly forgot that the left engine was at idle power because he put it there himself not even two minutes earlier."

And here we have the primary cause of all the confusion. It was not trivial to keep the plane at level, if engines had no power. The "sexism", the "given their earlier conversation, he surely knew where arguing with Okai would get him (which was nowhere)" aren't the cause here.

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No, sexism didn't cause the accident, but I'm glad the article brought it up. Those comments excusing men who murder their annoying wives were horrifying and frankly I think anyone who says stuff like that in the workplace (in this case, violating sterile cockpit) deserves to be exposed publicly (especially a divorce lawyer).

And, it is relevant context, given the kerffufle about whether to follow the checklist and how flustered Okai became.

> And, it is relevant context, given the kerffufle about whether to follow the checklist and how flustered Okai became.

No it’s not. The call to not follow the checklist came from the first officer (focusing on flying the plane was higher priority). The captain didn’t challenge him on it because he agreed with the call. There was no “kerffufle” or even disagreement.

I called it a kerfuffle because they started the engine shutdown checklist and then abandoned it after a couple of items, which seems pretty kerfuffly to me.

I thought the discussion with Moore was relevant because that argument had been about Okai not doing procedures by the book, and because Okai has been previously reprimanded for failing to follow an engine shutdown checklist.

> Those comments excusing men who murder their annoying wives were horrifying

You might think twice about your interpretation of this. It is mainstream psychology to recognize the effects that one human can have on another. Brainwashing happens. Induced mental trauma exists. Look at Charles Manson and the influence he had, look at Patty Hearst. Humans can have drastic influence over their victims (intentionally or unintentionally) and there should be no shame in the ensuing mental illness that results, and neither gender no perceived gender roles should diminish our sympathy for such victims.

To say carte blanche that no woman can mentally traumatize a man to the point that he should be considered a victim of brainwashing is a bit naive and likely sexist.

Brainwashing has nothing to do with this.

> To say carte blanche that no woman can mentally traumatize a man to the point that he should be considered a victim of brainwashing is a bit naive and likely sexist.

Who would say that and why???

> Those comments excusing men who murder their annoying wives were horrifying and frankly I think anyone who says stuff like that in the workplace (in this case, violating sterile cockpit) deserves to be exposed publicly (especially a divorce lawyer).

These are obviously horrible things to say, but people "vent" all the time to their friends saying things they don't mean. I've head women who recently got broken up with say all men should die, people say they wish their manager got hit by a bus, etc.

"Excusing murder" seems like the worst-faith interpretation here, and anyone who vents their angry thoughts being "publicly exposed" seems like it would do a lot more harm than good.

It's bizarre to fantasize about cancelling a [not dead] pilot and trying to get his wife to divorce him.

That would indeed be bizarre if somebody did that. (History: This originally said "dead", another comment corrected it and it was changed and subsequently that other comment was deleted. My comment above was also confused, I was thinking Okai was a divorce lawyer, but actually that was Ryan.)

Ryan —not Okai— is the one with a legal practice.

Ah, my bad, thanks for the correction. I had them mixed up. Well, that's a small relief.

I’m inclined to cite not so much “sexism” as “32-minute rant”. For all I care, it could be tabs vs spaces, with the same outcome.

> As First Officer Ryan listened, interjecting only occasionally to affirm his captain

So, I think the sexism is important to the explanatory narrative because it demonstrates the scale of the power imbalance between the captain and the first officer - the captain sat there and blabbed for 32 minutes including something so objectionable as musing about how if annoying women get murdered, it's their fault. Quoth the article:

> “These are the kind of women you don’t wanna get married to,” he said. “You know, some men, they lose their temper and the next thing you know, the wife is dead, you know… they start punching them and kicking them, and they lost their minds, you know… they kill the woman… it’s the woman who can drive you to do crazy stuff, you know?”

But the first officer was not empowered to object to that - not empowered to object for sexism and murder, not for tabs vs spaces, not for anything. There was, therefore, possibly nothing the captain could have said in that 32 minutes that the first officer would have objected to.

> So, I think the sexism is important to the explanatory narrative because it demonstrates the scale of the power imbalance between the captain and the first officer

Exactly. Patriarchy isn't just a system where all men have power over all women. It's also about hierarchies of men. A good example is the FLDS [1], which Jon Krakauer wrote about in Under the Banner of Heaven. [2] There, the highest-status men are supported by other men who are rewarded with dominance over other lower-down people. That produces a bunch of surplus young men who are eventually driven off.

This sort of continually enforced dominance hierarchy, whatever you think of it morally, is poisonous to the kind of mindset and relationships you need to keep up our (extraordinarily good) airline safety record.

And let me also add a plug for Dekker's "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'", which is on the surface about understanding airplane crashes, but does a great job of conveying why important technological systems require a very different way of thinking about things to succeed. One of my top books of all time, especially for anybody in tech who cares about uptime.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_ Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Banner_of_Heaven

Or the first officer just didn’t care. He didn’t call it up in the post interviews as something that he felt uncomfortable about. Sexism is shockingly rampant.

You don't think women might trade tirades about men when having off the record conversation with just two of them in the cockpit? People vent, it doesn't mean much by itself. If he had a fight with a male copilot, he may have had a different tirade.

Agreed. Women can be certainly be sexist and should be held to the same standard as men. If a woman crewmember said women can't be blamed for murdering annoying husbands while taxiing a 737, that would absolutely be inappropriate. And, the main point here wasn't that there was fight followed by sexist reflections on said fight, but that there was a fight.

That reminds me of this incident https://nypost.com/2017/02/12/crazed-pilot-rants-about-polit...

> You don't think women might trade tirades about men when having off the record conversation

Just in case it's news to anyone: they absolutely do. It's very eye opening when you witness such things. Women can be and often are just as hateful as men.

Hate is a normal human emotion.

An atmosphere of confusion and hostility.

The article clearly identifies stress (and potential power/trust issues between the pilots), not sexism per se as a potential causative factor.

As per other comments in this thread, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36591776

> The "sexism"

Not sure why the scare quotes. What he said was definitely sexist and doesn't need defending; and no one's claimed his sexism was the cause of the accident, so that argument doesn't need refuting either.

The idling was not the cause either - the problem as the report points out is the 1m40s the captain spent trying to talk to the tower, instead of going through the checklist to identify the failed engine. That was before they were set to idle.

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