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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

Could you link a few with injuries anywhere near this size? I feel like that’d be national news, so it’s surprising to hear it’s happening often.

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Not a control issue but there was a Hawaiian flight that had 36 injuries from turbulence. Edit to add: it would be unsurprising if turbulence was the cause here and the passenger quoted had their facts wrong.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/18/us/hawaiian-airlines-injuries...

An airplane doesn't suddenly drop out of the sky because its controls stops responding. So I agree that on the face of it it's either turbulence or some sort of aggressive manoeuvre, either initiated by the pilots accidentally or somehow initiated by the airplanes control systems, not simply "stopped responding to controls".

Yeah, I just started typing out a scenario where instruments blipping might do it and it started getting implausible several clauses in.

https://avherald.com/h?article=51212eb5

https://avherald.com/h?article=515c54c7

https://avherald.com/h?article=5153c289

https://avherald.com/h?article=514dd2cc

https://avherald.com/h?article=51474192

https://avherald.com/h?article=50a9fa9f

https://avherald.com/h?article=512e34e3

Only three are "anywhere near", but you get the idea, that's just browsing the first page with the accident filter on.

None of those are "flight control issues".

“Flight control issues” is a passenger’s retelling of what they remember a pilot saying.

I have heard a lot of passengers recount events from incident flights. I have seen vanishingly few where there was much overlap between what actually happened and what they believe happened.

So? The Australian regulators (ATSB) have reason to believe the accident is related to flight systems resetting.

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