Posts by user "13 others" [Posts: 10 Total up-votes: 0 Pages: 1]

Baysian statistics play no role here, for the reason Lead Balloon identified: there are too many variables at play. Worse, Simpson's paradox identifies that, even in the circumstance where you know the key variables at play, you've still got to think clearly through what is going on.

You did stipulate that more causality factors can be calculated using Baysian means, but so what? Back to LB's first point: calculating all of them is not practical.

While the general public (i.e. The Simpsons) can be impressed with statements like "A billion flight hours without a mishap" what matters is the precise combination of factors that caused the earlier mishap, and how similar current circumstances are to that mishap. Viewed with such insight, mishaps are almost ordinarily common (aviation example being 178 seconds to live for a VFR pilot going VMC into IMC).

Before this accident occurred, Boeing whistleblowers were in fact reporting that planes were leaving the line, entering service with defects (including swarf) that would cause accidents many years later.

The TWA 800 airframe was 25 years old at the time of the accident, where arced wiring was implicated in that crash. In the aftermath, industry-wide sampling of aircraft found cracked insulation on wiring, non-factory swarf added by follow-on maintenance, instances where wiring had been re-routed or manipulated in a manner that placed increased strain on looms, etc. Of course the problem with wiring-related problems is that they can produce faults that no engineer could have foreseen or have developed countermeasures for.

Not to be an alarmist, but much has been written about wiring issues on the aging fleet. I tend to believe that maintenance people in earlier generations were more conscientious about their work, where now more than ever corners are cut (beginning at the factory).

Perhaps a result of being too dense, in these threads I have not understood whatsoever the discussions on L/D, best glide, AOA, stall speed, angles, whatever, as being relevant to this flight. I assume that the pilot flying was flying, i.e. stick and rudder. I give him/her the benefit of the doubt on account of being a pilot. Professional or not.

In the accident observed, the lessons learned in a Piper Cub, or lessor, apply. If you sense that you're going to smack the ground, then by God smack the ground with that part of you best engineered to take the relevant forces involved. Even pigeons understand this. This is a function of intuition. It's pointless to waste ink/electrons on the subject. In simple terms, the bottom-side of the aircraft most compressible without tender flesh involved is where a pilot should be expected to pitch to. These pilots, from a far away perspective, did it right. Proof being that someone walked away.

https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/NM-18...SIB_NM-18-33_1

The Service Bulletin (link below) referenced on page 6 of the preliminary report describes just that...fuel control switches without detents or what the bulletin describes as a "locking feature" that can be "disengaged" and still allow the switch to function. It's somewhat of a glaring omission that the report did not state the status (detent or not) of the switches on this aircraft. Presumably if no-detent switches were found then an emergency AD would already have been issued.

https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/NM-18...SIB_NM-18-33_1

Best theory I've seen so far.


I assume the unusual alarm cacophony that erupted after cutting the engines would have been overwhelming. Agree an error in good faith. If bad faith were involved, the switches wouldn't have returned to the run position, or at least they wouldn't have been allowed to remain there.

Um, the flap and gear levers are a totally different design and they look, feel, operate differently. They are not even co-located, and occasionally people confuse them, withstanding decades of design efforts.
The fact that EICAS messages were recorded does not mean that they were provided in the preliminary report.

The notion is that around liftoff EICAS reported an error related to an error logged on the previous flight, that the PM felt it prudent to remedy the problem by cutting the stab cutoff switches, inadvertently cutting fuel. Action-slip, as mentioned countless times in these threads.

But there was electrical power to the switch.

What is there to discuss on your proposed topic? How pilots unions foster an environment that practically abuses young pilots that results in grave consequences decades later when senior pilots have no family support? How regulators allow psychological research to be used on a select professional in order to maximize work extraction on behalf of industry management and stock shareholders?

This is to ask, what will be the subject matter that you'd like to dissect on the topic you propose to discuss?

I too know a captain whose recurrent training caused degraded capacity to be revealed. After being temporarily grounded, a workup revealed EOAD.

Both dementia and profound stress can produce mental fog behaviors such that over-stressed people can be forgetful and make the kinds of mistakes seen in people with early-onset dementia. To interview friends and family about behaviors in the months before the crash could reveal dementia-type symptoms, but this would not be conclusive.

To your point, it should be expected that, if remains are available for study, there's a small chance that autopsy findings could reveal dementia-associated changes in the brain. For example, the final accident report on a 2023 Nevada medevac crash reports a 3cm intracranial tumor found on autopsy (not dementia-related, but they looked to some extent).