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tialaramexyesterday at 5:58 PM1 replyview on HN

One of the most important things NASA does, ignoring for a moment the unknowable value of say, discovering that Mars once had microbial life, is ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/

You know how (scheduled, ie you buy tickets to SF, no prior relation to the crew, money for a service) aviation is incredibly safe? Well, one way you can continue increasing safety when you've already fixed all the things which keep going wrong enough that they happened and you corrected for them, is collect incidents where things didn't go wrong.

But obviously no pilot is going to just say "I nearly killed everybody" in public 'cos that's career ending, so ASRS collects these reports anonymously and in fact promises you immunity for certain things if you reported them first. So they can see e.g. sure nobody ever died on a plane because a pilot pushed the "kill everybody" button on the new Boeing cost-optimised "It's probably fine" B123-Extra but here are six reports from pilots who pushed "kill everybody" but were able to push "Whoops, no don't do that" in the six seconds left to prevent it. So this means no the FAA should not approve Boeing's request to remove the "unnecessary" Whoops button from future models and actually maybe the FAA OK for the "kill everybody" button should be revisited 'cos it doesn't say anything about pilots pressing it easily by accident in Boeing's request...


Replies

mikeocoolyesterday at 7:33 PM

Irrelevant side note:

If you looked at https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ and thought, wow this webpage must 25 years old, you would be incorrect! In 2000, they had a very 1990s website with the option for a flash version and non-flash version: https://web.archive.org/web/20000407212204/http://asrs.arc.n...

The early versions of this design arrived in 2008, though it has a sweet sweet flash header complete with audio until 2021.

An even more irrelevant side note: it appears that archive.org has a javascript based flash emulator built in to run old flash websites, which is pretty amazing.