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Comment by maybelsyrup | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, but how to square this with the earlier report [1] saying that one of the pilots had told a passenger after the incident that their instruments had blacked out during the incident?

(Edit: which I see now has actually been mentioned in the last paragraph of the OP's article -- but still not explained.)

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/12/australia/latam-airlines-flig...

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I'll defer to a 787 driver, but it's not out of the question that a forceful kick out of autopilot like this could make some screens refresh at once, and I know they'll change color and some will change shapes. So what we could be seeing is multiple screen blink plus that well-known phenomenon of temporal distortion when adrenaline hits our meaty processing unit. A blink seemed like "turning off".

Also, the seat moves on its own. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7DLNKU2wEjM

Having said all that, pretty ghetto, nonetheless. A plastic-y rocker switch that can "stick on" right through the bendy bendy plastic cover, with no AOG sensors telling it to not move in flight. Back in the day, anything that moved, impinged, or otherwise poked the pilot in his pilot areas had to be made so that there was positive feedback, either with a beep, or a cover that clicked, or somesuch. Hopefully they got an actual fix in the pipeline that doesn't add yet another memory item to the pilot checklist.

It's entirely plausible that 1) the passenger misheard, or 2) the pilot made an excuse to cover up an embarrassing blunder, or 3) someone is lying.

Given the source is a frazzled non-pilot quoting a (likely also frazzled) pilot, I’d discount it.

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