logoalt Hacker News

1123581321today at 12:10 PM1 replyview on HN

What do you expect might change between the preliminary and the final report?


Replies

gpmtoday at 12:53 PM

Well for one I would expect the final report to actually come to any sort of conclusion and not just transcribe the conversations between air traffic control and the plane, and the data recorded by the plane. The preliinary report doesn't support (or contradict) the judgment that the pilots just need to "get gud" at all - it doesn't make that sort of judgment at all.

For another I'd note that past investigations into accidents that at the surface were the pilot making a very bad decision have found a laundry list of underlying causes that need to be fixed. E.g. see Ontario Flight 1363 where the proximate cause was not de-icing a plane that clearly needed de-icing and the root causes after investigation were a whole lot of institutional issues.

And finally at a glance I note that the air traffic control tower appears to have approved this plane flying on instruments, a procedure only allowed when "local altimeter setting [is] received" - apparently referring to GPS. In doing so they had the military disable the jamming. The pilots appear to have communicated to the tower that they would be using that approval until further notice (notice that was anticipated in a couple of minutes). And that the tower apparently without informing the pilots appears to have approved restarting the GPS jamming... I'm not an expert but if I were asked to investigate this (a thing that non-experts are sometimes asked to do, e.g. with the aforementioned flight)... I suggest that this leads to obvious alternate theories of what went wrong such as instruments they had good cause to rely on silently misleading them.

show 2 replies