Gentle tip from a lifelong aviation enthusiast: wait one week before reading on causation.
Exposing yourself to first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive since the actual findings can rhyme with the false speculation closely enough that you wind up muddling the two in your mind.
Pro tip from a lifelong life enthusiast: if its breaking news, wait one week - first-week speculation isn’t just unproductive, it’s often counterproductive.
Flick through last weeks newspaper if you need reassurance.
Then you're only getting things important to viewership. Nobody's putting an economically critical trade deal on all the channels, or a genocide in Yemen. But Princess Diana dying, that's gonna get coverage.
> Especially as she's supposed to have died 28 years ago
If you don’t watch television news, flipping through the channels can be genuinely surprising. Because if it’s Princess Diana’s birthday, I almost guarantee one of them will be running a retrospective segment.
I really like the Economist as a source of weekly news.
Somehow I’ve ended up primarily reading their daily recap in the app. They already have a full article on this crash. That usually means it’ll be in the magazine next week.
They've always been upfront about their bias, in no way are they trying to hide it.
Way back when I was in college 20 years ago they ran a very funny article poking fun at all the PhD's doing "deconstruction" on The Economist. Like super post-modernist fluff. I could tell the writer had a great time responding to it.
Their punchline: "so there you have it - a newspaper to make you feel good about tomorrow by promoting capitalism today!"
I have gave up on E. once they supported GWB over Gore. I can barely understand over the top devotion to neoliberalism and deregulation. But the shortcomings of GWB were sticking out in the campaign, so closing the eyes and singing "la la liberalism" was way too much for me.
I had been a Economist subscriber for almost 20 years. But then gradually I realized that their reporting on some issues are extremely biased and they conveniently skip reporting some facts to match their intended narrative and lead the reader to distorted conclusions. So I would assume they would be doing the same with other topics as well. I did not renew my subscription.
What do you read? I’m an economist reader too for weekly news.
Would love other sources, but it’s hard to find anything with similar depth and a similar lack of sensational-ization found in most news.
Edit: Oh, and global reach. The economist covers earth in almost equal detail for every region. Not quite equal of course, but darn close compared to most outlets.
I think WSJ is a good complement to the Economist. They have good, unsensationalized coverage of the facts. I ignore their opinion columns as they don't seem very serious.
That's just another Murdoch rag, I wouldn't wipe my arse with it. Better no news than his news. You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
You think the opinion pages are the only place he pushes his agenda? The very stories they report are selected to further the narrative he wants. That's why apologies and retractions are always tiny.
In my experience, WSJ just reports what happened and who said what in a very dry way.
My impression is that their news section provides a very anti Republican party view. Note that this is my impression, not the paper's stance. They don't really take any, apart from the opinion section, which I ignore. The opinion section has a massive pro republican bent.
> Lying by omission
I'll admit, I might have a blind spot here because I'm only reading 2 newspapers. That being said, I'm not sure of any stories reported by the other news outlets which were ignored/downplayed by WSJ.
> apologies and retractions
Happen when they happen. I remember a few per month. But since they're so dry, there's very little scope for major corrections. If they say, "this guy said that", there's very little to correct there. Occasionally, they mis-paraphrase someone and have to correct their report. Most sound like honest mistakes to me.
EDIT:
> You aren't getting any sort of counterpoint you are getting whatever supports his world view.
Fair enough, but you mostly don't get any points to counter in the first place. Only plain dry facts. I go to the Economist for opinions and counter opinions. (*side note, the Economist should publish more counter opinions IMO)
https://newlinesmag.com/ has been a favorite of mine lately if you wanna give that a try, it's got global coverage and there's always something interesting to read
I also read the Economist.
Other than that, Wall Street Journal is quite good at purely factual, unopinionated coverage. Note that their Opinion section is heavily biased towards the American right, but I mostly ignore it. It's clearly labeled as Opinion.
Between the Economist and WSJ, I get a good overview of opinions and facts.
I really enjoy the Monocle "Globalist" podcast which is well-produced, of global range, and a welcome departure from the npr/kqed bubble I was immersed in.
> Form your own opinion, based on multiple source plus your own judgement
I think the essence of these statements is less that you should literally listen to whatever distilled amount of world news your coworkers are talking about and take it as fact, but that if it's remotely necessary for you to even be aware of, let alone have an opinion about, it'll present itself somehow in real life. After that, if it qualifies as relevant to your life, then go about searching for more info, but a vast majority of anything you could hear or read about or watch probably doesn't qualify.
Government policy, sure, if you need to respond to or act on it somehow. Conflict in the middle east? Sure, if you or someone you know has ties there. But again you'll probably just hear about it because it's directly impactful, or you can monitor specifically for those updates using narrow channels.
The problem is, they often assume you already read the news and don’t say what happen just provide the analysis without context.
Heck, Spiegel does that with news on the same day. You get some background article without starting with the facts of what happened, as if everybody reads the news every two hours.
Unfortunately for everyone's brains, this turned out to basically not be true with COVID- only real news fans (or people with expertise in the relevant science, but there are way less of those) were remotely aware that offices probably weren't going to be closed for only two weeks[0]. If you followed the news closely you stocked up on toilet paper when there were runs on it in Hong Kong, before there were runs on it where you were, etc. But if you only got news from the office water-cooler you'd have been none the wiser.
This is one of those exceptions that prove the rule though, I think.
[0] I had this conversation with people multiple times so it must have been common
If nobody followed the news or social media, there wouldn’t have been runs on toilet paper to begin with, as there never was a shortage to begin with and it was all just mass hysteria.
It was never clear to me, but at least part of it was supposedly due to everyone pooping at home using consumer TP instead of at the office, using commercially packaged TP (two-ply, giant rolls for big dispensers). And that sudden shift started to empty shelves. If people had stocked up over a period of time, the empty-shelves situation that produced the fear probably wouldn't have happened.
Of course in practice there really was plenty of it to go around, dollar stores seemed to be the most flexible at navigating the supply chain derangement and if you didn't mind buying it by the roll, it was never really hard to find.
Also- you don't need to follow the news for there to be a panic, empty shelves will do that all on their own. Everyone deciding to stock up a little on everything was enough to deplete shelves, people walking in after saw empty shelves and stocked up more, etc. I don't think most people were following the "omg supply chain" news, they just saw depleted shelves.
I never really understood the importance of it anyway. People were locked in their home so they could just use the shower head if it came to it. Of course a real bidet would be better and cleaner but I don't think they exist in northern America or Northern Europe.
It's also common in Asia (at least South East) they can survive without toilet paper :) The Japanese even have entire water jet massage toilets, they do it like a king.
Or if you don't want to use water, you could use serviettes, tissues. Even newspaper.
That's why I didn't understand the fuss about it. Sure it's annoying if you run out but not the end of the world especially when you're at home where there's always a shower to hand. I don't understand that people were so obsessed with toilet paper.
What would be much more important is food, water (in my city the tap water is terrible so I don't drink it), medication etc.
I would put it at 1% here. They are extremely rare. Bidet attachments have become relatively popular here over the past decade though. It's been life changing (or maybe butt changing). It's amazing how pretentious Americans can be while having such a gross habit.
Yeah, the deep irony of the GP comment is that, had all of these supposedly knowledgable people just read the original report from the WHO (~early 2020), they'd have realized many things about the virus (such as the extremely skewed age distribution of the seriously ill) that would have greatly mitigated the overall panic. It literally took years for the chattering class in medicine to understand basic information that was available at the beginning of the pandemic.
COVID was a perfect case study of mass hysteria, and how you can't even trust "the experts" in these situations, because the "experts" you hear from early on are also generally the ones who are the most willing to spout pure speculation for attention. Humans are gonna human, and a background in science doesn't change that fact.
A million Americans did die of it, the lost QALYs was... a lot. A lot of people died who had more than a decade, actuarially. That's a big deal.
But it doesn't matter for what I'm saying: paying too much attention to the news about a weird new virus from China would have clued a person in that something big might be coming, on whatever dimension you care to measure it.
But would that have been actionable information for the average person? What would you have done differently on the first day, given perfect information?
The Covid pandemic lasted much longer than would have been reasonable to prepare for via hoarding of supplies etc.
In my view, that was the entire problem: Much of the world overreacted in the short term (hard lockdowns including fining people going for a walk by themselves etc.) and underreacted in the long term (limiting avoidable large indoor gatherings such as most office work, air filters etc.)
Many governments did as much as people would tolerate for as long as they could (which meant, for some, doing nothing at all), rather than focusing on doing effective things they could actually keep up as long as required.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but I really hope that’s a lesson many learned from it.
That was pure panic. I live in the gulf coast. Anytime there is a minor chance we are getting hit by a hurricane people panic buy and suddenly there isn't any water on the shelves anymore. You'll see average folks with 20 cases of water being shoved in their massive SUVs for a family of 3.
Sure. However, I bought a large pack of toilet paper when I saw headlines about hoarding in HK, before the shelves began to dwindle here, and thus dodged the whole thing. That it was basically panic is neither here nor there: paying too close attention to far-off news did actually pay off in a tiny way.
TP shortages in Hong Kong were rational, based on an expectation of bulk shipping issues. Stocking up in North America based on shortages in Hong Kong was idiotic. If there are shortages of TP in Hong Kong that means there would be a surplus of TP in North America, since North America is where the pulp for most TP is made.
Sure, probably. It still helped me dodge the panic that set in a couple weeks later though. Sometimes midwit thought works. I wasn't stocking a Scrooge McDuck room full of the stuff. I think it was when I saw stories of hoarding spread to Australia that I realized that maybe this it was going to have legs, rationally or not.
Like so many addictive habits, while you’re in it day to day, it feels so… important… and when you’re out… it doesn’t even make sense that complete truth could be fully knowable in the moment.
Most consequential decisions are made, or built up to, over a long time. Sure, somebody has to call moment-to-moment balls and strikes, but if that’s not literally you, your weight in the world might be better applied in slower, quieter, subtler places.
Am I morbidly curious about a plane crash? How could I not be? But the NTSB didn’t earn the credibility they have by parachuting in day-of and shooting from the hip. If anything, their processes provide discipline against first impressions blinding them to true causes.
To the contrary, I find analysis very helpful when it's of the "is this important; is this unusual; how does it fit in with previous expectations" variety. Raw headlines and factual day-to-day reporting are often kind of bad at that.
Same. I have never really followed the news. Everyone always seems to be upset by something in the news. Meanwhile I'm happy as a clam all the time and just have all my time to focus on myself and doing what I want and like.
You could spend the time you'd have spent reading the news instead reading actual books on history, poli sci and political philosophy, ethics, economics, et c., and then figure out who the right person to vote for is and what the right votes on various issues are in like 30 minutes of search-n-skim per election.
This pattern would result in a far better-informed voter than one who diligently follows the news all the time but doesn't read many books. The amount of news you need to read to make informed decisions at the ballot box is usually tiny, if you have the background to understand the news—and if you don't, consuming more news won't help much with that. Meanwhile, it takes a ton of close book-reading before you start to see diminishing returns on that front.
I have a BA in history and a MPA in public administration. I have already done a ton of that work: research, academic analysis/writing, and understanding. I agree these things are INCREDIBLY important to have a great foundational understanding of how the world works/worked; however, understanding current events is JUST AS IMPORTANT.
But; I'm done arguing w/you as it's clear your opinion will remain unchanged regardless of any evidence or opinion to the contrary.
Even if news reading informs an electorate, there's no need to be informed constantly when I only have limited opportunities to vote.
When an election happens, I can do a search of news on the candidates, and for discussions of the other issues put to the voters. In the meantime, by avoiding news, I can save a lot of distress about news that I can't change and doesn't have an immediate effect on me. (Nobody in this thread, including me, is great at avoiding news, me included... really important events tend to bubble up anyway, and all of us clicked into a discussion of an event that's probably not personally relevant)
It'd be different if a cat delivered tomorrow's paper to my door; I might not like it, but I'd have a duty to read that paper and try to make right what once went wrong.
My girlfriend says she doesn't trust the media, but she has to follow it to know what they're lying to us about. I've pointed out that the problem goes deeper than just whether they tell truth or lies. They don't just tell you what to think; they tell you what you're even supposed to be thinking about, and by omission what you shouldn't be thinking about. You can take the opposite position on every issue to the one they're pushing, but you're still letting them frame the window of what you are and aren't thinking and forming opinions about.
The only way to take that control away from them is to cut the primary "news" sources out of your life entirely. I still hear about important events from people around me, and I can see what people are hyperventilating about at forums like this, which is more than enough to know what the media is hyping each day and why.
That's the funny thing, I'm not out of the loop. When friends bring up current issues that matter, I'm generally better informed than they are, but I'm clueless if they bring up the latest controversial TV show or whatever is today's outrage narrative that will be replaced by the next outrage narrative tomorrow.
It turns out that by letting the people around me sort of curate the "news," and reading thinkers who write about bigger topics rather than what's in the headlines, I wind up with a pretty good filtered news feed.
> How do you decide to vote if you completey go out of the loop?
I tend to stay pretty well informed without watching cable news or constantly reading political gossip on social media. When I hear things like "the Supreme Court issued an opinion today..." I go read the opinion. When I hear "Trump signed an executive order saying..." I go read the executive order. When I'm talking with people about inflation, I go look up the BLS data among other things. If people are talking about what's actually happening on the ground some place, I will end up having to find some reports reporting things and ultimately have to weigh the fact they're choosing where to point their cameras to my understanding of what is actually true.
Some of these things are hard, like the "big beautiful bill" is 1,116 pages long. I'll jump to the things people around me are talking about, like work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP, and read those sections. I might go look up some direct commentary from trusted sources about it for deeper analysis, and probably try and find some real statistics to compare.
We have so much actual real data and original sources to go read, I don't need someone else to tell me what they think of it for me to have an opinion.
Not to be rude, but why should we care what you believe?
If there were a problem with holes being dug in the city people are not exacerbating the problem if they choose to just not dig holes.
Not everyone needs to be informed an act on whatever it is that others think is important. This belief really forms the backbone of the current, "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality.
Whatever the cause is, it's entirely possible to just treat people decently without caring about who or what they are. That's where we should be encouraging people to get to, not demanding they jump into action.
I totally get that, and agree to a degree. For me personally though, the news industry has become entertainment - TV news is hyperbolic, 24 hour breaking news for every story, newspapers (at least here in the UK) are little more than a propaganda outlet for the views of the billionaire owner where every story is designed to make people angry and point the blame at someone, usually immigrants. For years I listened to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme every single morning, until I realised that none of what they were telling me was actually news. You'd be amazed at how many stories started with the words "Ministers are today expected to announce..." - this isn't news, it hasn't happened yet. This is government PR. If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend Flat Earth News by Nick Davies [0] - it's incredibly eye opening. Reading it now, 11 years later, is even more eye opening - everything he writes about in there is now magnified ten fold.
Going cold turkey from the "news" doesn't make me any less informed about what is happening in the world, if anything it has made me more informed as I'm no longer just a vessel filling my brain with whatever some billionaire wants me to believe.
That "BREAKING NEWS" fuss is kinda a US specific thing though.
In Holland we just watch the news at 6 or 8pm (at least for those who still do that) which is very factual. Or we read nu.nl or nos.nl which don't really have screaming clickbaity headlines unless some shit really hit a fan. Which is really rare. I prefer nos.nl because nu.nl has too much celebrity news for me.
But we don't have any of that weird "Watch this NOW or get left behind!!" FOMO bait I see when I tune up CNN.
It probably helps that NOS is publicly funded so they have no incentive to maximise "engagement". Their job is just to report the news in a clean way.
I'm in the UK and while nowhere near as mad as US news channels, it's definitely been heading in that direction for a while. Even the BBC, our publicly funded station is like it now thanks to several years of the far right campaigning to get the BBC's funding taken away. Tune in to BBC news now and you're highly likely to see stories on "issues" that 90% of the population has no interest or opinion on, but some swivel-eyed, right wing fringe nutjobs have managed to push into mainstream news.
I wonder what you mean by that. What is so bad that happens if you don't watch the news for a day or a few days? A colleague might mention something you didn't know yet? I'm sure they'd be happy to fill you in.
Most of the news we see has no actual effect on our lives anyway. Like this crash. It's terrible but other than feeling bad for them (which doesn't help them) it doesn't affect my life in any way. If I find out about it at a later time that's fine. Probably when admiral cloudberg makes one of her masterpieces about it. I read the news anyway as a matter of interest and "nothing better to do" but to me it's mostly a time sink. I only read about 1% of the articles in the main feed.
I often go on retreats with friends and I hardly use my phone and the TV never goes on for even a second :) It's really nice to unplug. I can recommend having an unplug day once in a while for starters.
Your attempt at an irritated jab is just the doomscroll addiction talking.
Even for people that read news out of necessity, it can be curtailed down to only the relevant topics and the dryer outlets. I am one of those people, and the need to stay up to date doesn't justify the junkfood.
years ago i wanted to make a site where you could log promises/predictions made in news media and then get a reminder to come back and check if it actually happened. This would be useful for all the doom and gloom headlines and predictions, especially economic ones.
I stopped reading/watching/listening to the news about 2 years ago and I am blissfully unaware of what is going on in the world. I read hacker news every once in a while and even comment on some of the stories shown here but I select very strictly the topics I interact with.
News organizations these days are all pushing an agenda. Whether it is pro [insert-topic-of-choice-here] or against [insert-topic-of-choice-here] and that irks me when they represent themselves as impartial and unbiased.
If I want to read some propaganda, I know where to find it.
I understand but in the past you probably did not have much of a choice. You read the newspaper your parents read or you listened to the same radio programs and watch the same TV channels so the bias was not necessarily apparent.
Nowadays, we know exactly which outlets are leaning right or left, there is clearly no doubt about.
Furthermore, I would argue that the news outlets squandered the last bit of credibility they had during the COVID period when they silenced views that were not deemed acceptable at the time.
Finally a lot of news outlets are in some parts funded by the very same governments that they are supposed to be reporting on and keep in check. How can you do your job properly without any bias if the person you are about to write about/criticize is the one who signs your paycheck?
Regarding the original sentiment though, uninformed vs misinformed...
Isn't this basically just good old signal processing? We either don't have enough signal, or we're saturated with noise. Economic feedback loops keep the news noise at a saturated level; we don't seem to be able to collectively agree or incentivize having a spot of information spectrum that has a decent discernible signal.
The "free" press is no more free than it was 300 years ago. Then it was owned by despotic interests. Today, it is owned by need to make money.
And I've just seen that you CAN get The Guardian Weekly digital subscription here, free if you've got a print subscription? Though obviously I'm wondering why the Guardian don't advertise this?
Yeah that's weird. The Guardian has a global catchment area. It's no longer a Manchester or UK paper. A lot of foreign readers wouldn't subscribe to a print sub because it's not worth the hassle.
I'd also feel bad getting some dead trees filled with chemicals and flown across the pond then someone driving it out to me, all that environmental impact when I could just download it.
Considering the amount of cash and/or subsidies that Le Monde has received in the last 30 years from the French government, you may as well read the Pravda. Nobody bites the hand that feeds them.
Basically the French new outlets are some of the most subsidized on the planet.
Just to give you some quick figures, in 2010, the French government gave news outlets 1.8B euros in subsidies and in 2012 another 1.2B euros. There is no mention of the subsidies in the years after that but there is no reason to think that these would have shrunk significantly.
That's not even mentioning the special tax breaks that journalists get and the fact that most news outlets are staffed by union members.
Knowing that most unions are leaning left politically, it is fair to say that the coverage of the news by these outlets will be tainted by their political ideology. It's just human nature.
All of this to say that in light of all this, it is best to treat any French news outlet as basically an arm of the government that will never go against the interests of the their real owners, the politicians, unions and the billionaires.
Le Monde is but one of these outlets but nevertheless they take the money just like the other ones.
Not necessarily. In Holland our NOS is publicly funded which is just defined by law. A minister can't just change that.
If anything they get complaints of being left leaning sometimes. While our government is (well, was, it just collapsed) a hard-line radical right wing one similar to Trump.
Reading one source of news only, especially one with such marked bias, is bound to leave you with a limited worldview. Consult instead a variety of sources.
I used to do that too, but the Rittenhouse incident was the final straw for me. I remember reading in the magazine that he "shot into the crowd", but by that point I had already watched the video analysis on the New York Times's YouTube channel which showed that he only shot at people who attacked him. That was what the jury agreed with as well.
In the end, I think the most accurate place to get your news from is a history book.
I don't know if that's meant to be a joke or serious, but I would disagree.
Most daily news is quite factual, assuming a reputable source. It doesn't require detective work the way plane crashes do.
And when it is incorrect or misleading, a week usually won't make a difference. It takes months or years or decades for the truth to come out, often in a book by a journalist or historian who frames it as a "tell-all", or a Pulitzer Prize-nominated series of newspapers articles, etc.
Is there an online version of “last week’s newspaper”? More specifically, that primarily contains reporting about somewhat “matured” topics, as opposed to still developing news.
It’s not online, but Delayed Gratification is a quarterly news magazine that reports on the news of the _previous_ quarter with an up-to-date perspective. It’s British but covers world news.
I agree with that wholeheartedly. The problem is that people want to discuss today's news now. Explaining them this and not being able to engage in the conversation isn't a great way to connect with people unfortunately.
I suppose one way (now that you've brought this up, which is totally valid), is to openly state that this is what we know right now, and that often changes in a week.
And that could itself be a tangent in the conversation, alternate theories. (Or might be a frustrating one if nobody is receptive)
Mine has been crazy - sunny, then rained, now overcast and all while being unseasonably humid. I should have mowed the lawn while it was sunny earlier but missed the window to get it done.
blancolirio on YT gives more timely but objective (i.e., tries to stick to the latest facts) takes on aviation incidents. There will be a fair bit of speculation still...
He made a quick video on this one, but just listing questions we don't have answers to yet, and warning that there will be plenty of speculation. I expect he will have several follow ups as more facts come up.
9/11 showed us the damages of a plane crash with a full load of fuel can do and goes to show why dumping fuel is part of the procedures when planes are coming inf for a landing under "strained" conditions.
Fuel dumping is overwhelmingly to prevent or minimize an overweight landing and subsequent brake/tire overheating and inspections. It’s got not much to do with minimizing fuel-fed fire after impact.
Yes. Unfortunately this year alone will give him quite a backlog. Every month there's been a couple of disasters or near disasters and there's no apparent connection between any of them.
I can mostly only speak for my own industry (software engineering), but subjectively, it seems like we lost a lot of institutional knowledge as well as organizational structures through Covid that will take a while to rebuild.
Between people going into early retirement (I heard aviation was hit particularly hard by this), people changing careers and their replacements not having much in-office spin up time etc., and some industries/markets never returning to in-person work at all when it used to be common before, I have some theories on where we lost both.
I haven't by any means been keeping count but it does feel like there have been a lot more incidents that usual this year, and certainly a lot more fatalities.
What I can't work out whether that's recency bias, or because I've been watching a lot of MentourPilot with our daughters so I'm simply more attuned to this kind of news, or if there really are more of them.
I certainly don't know if the rate of incidents per passenger mile flown is higher than usual.
No, it's not worse. If you look through the list of deadly plane accidents, the last year has been average (4 vs. 3 avg).
Since the deadly DCA collision in January, there are things making the news now that would never have in the past, so it seems like it's worse. Especially if the plane has "Boeing" written on the side. For example, hitting animals, tire blowouts, or ground equipment bumping into planes, which grounds them for inspection. When I worked for a major airline, those things are all actually pretty common and happen everywhere, all the time.
It's just a method used to stoke fear and feed clicks.
People find the most minute thing to complain about. Recently, there was an article about the antiquated FAA system using floppies. While the system is old and showing it's cracks, saying it uses floppies just makes it sound worse then it is. As of 2020, our mx crew were still plugging a Windows 98 laptop with DOS into Embraers and Bombardier Dash8s, and used floppies in Boeings (no Airbus or ATRs in our fleet for comparison).
There is a media difference though since the DCA crash. Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January. My point is the same, media sees crash, tries to drive clickage.
On a personal level, I know three people that have died in small plane crashes in the Alaska wilderness in the last 15 years, which is so common that it didn't even get on local news. I have acquaintances that were in involved in two others elsewhere over the last few years. Small planes are unbelievably dangerous. Commercial jets, not so much.
Small planes are about twice as safe per mile as motorcycles, all-cause to all-cause.
Now, there’s planes running out of fuel and drunk driving on cycles that some operators might choose to exclude from their own risk calculations, but it’s a little over one order of magnitude riskier than cars.
Whether that’s unbelievably dangerous is up to personal judgment.
> Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January.
We don't hear about military jet crashes unless they're F-35s. The controversial jet gets coverage because it gets eyeballs from people satisfying their confirmation bias. These are never put into context of course.
> The F-16 has been involved in over 670 hull-loss accidents as of January 2020.[312][313]
Fighter jets are simply dangerous, period. They're meant to be flown right at the bleeding edge, accidents are inevitable. But every time an F-35 crashes, the media makes a big deal out of it and idiots see that as confirmation of their belief that the F-35 is bad. Even if the F-35 is bad, it crashing sometimes wouldn't be evidence of that. Occasional crashes are just what happens when fighter jets get flown a lot. It's going to happen whether the jet is good or bad.
Having flown tactical jets off an aircraft carrier into Afghanistan . . . you seem to be conflating "dangerous" with "inherently unforgiving." Flying jets in combat against a peer foe is dangerous. Flying them in peacetime is inherently unforgiving. "Dangerous" occurs when I as an aviator can be taken out by something not under my control or that of my pilot or fellow aircrew.
The reason verbiage matters is because many people fear flying because they look at it as some kind of gamble as opposed to something where risks can be mitigated down quite a bit by the act of being safety-conscious. Even flying multi-plane low-levels or opposed large force exercises are not "dangerous" per se, so long as everyone plays by the rules and takes it seriously. Civil aviation is so safe because of a culture of making it safe.
He is actually really good. By far the best on YouTube. The quality is so high (because it's based on technical reports), you can learn something from it as a professional engineer.
MentourPilot is not exactly the only YouTuber going off of actual technical reports, and I did not question his accuracy — I said I find him "grating". I'd rather watch old Mayday episodes than MentourPilot — Greg Feith, for one, is a great communicator. John Cox, too.
I find his content over-produced. As in, he puts too much effort into the production instead of just dispensing the information. I like Kelsey from 74-Gear and Juan Browne for their down to earth delivery. But that's what makes YouTube great having so many choices.
I hope he makes $20k. Or more. I enjoy his content and the insight he brings.
Also many people make money from the tragedy of others. Morticians, coffin builders, clean up crews, construction workers, concrete companies…I could probably come up with 100 more examples.
Just because their work is from the result of something tragic doesn’t mean it is any less important.
Being completely frank he does a very good thing. He's got through to our eldest about how important it is to do things correctly, and be systematic and detail oriented, in a way that her mum and I have really struggled to.
The irony of it is that a couple of months back I was sat in the living room watching MentourPilot, she came in and asked what I was watching, said "Ugh, boring!" Then she sat down and started playing on our Switch... and then she just got sucked in to the episode, and is now completely obsessed with watching MentourPilot. She often knows what's gone wrong and what the pilots should have done instead before he even explains it.
So the guy's all right with me and absolutely welcome to make as much money as he can: he's a great educator.
Most of his videos are on crashes. He has said he won't speculate on active investigations, but has already done videos on what is known, and preliminary reports.
You're either misremembering or misunderstood something, or I'm not understanding what you mean, because Mentour Pilot literally has a channel with nothing but air crash investigation videos: https://youtube.com/@mentourpilot
He has one of the best air crash investigation journalists, Kyra Dempsey (aka Admiral Cloudberg) as one of the writers on the channel.
They already have a YouTube Short listing the facts of the crash, and also have a longer video about the Jeju one. Only the facts, no speculation - they're waiting for the preliminary or even final report to make a full in depth video on it.
You're upset that he's benefiting by providing an expert perspective on a topic you're interested in?
Boy, you must be upset about pretty much everything on the internet. Except for hn. Paul Graham just runs this site out of his own benevolence, nothing else.
Of unknown provenance, with unknown visual artefacts, et cetera. Even if completely legit, with context and thus chain of causation obscured to the point that discerning ultimate and proximate causes is impossible.
Agreed, but it doesn't look like AI. Video(s) look real to my untrained eyes. Everyone is going to speculate regardless of the top level disclaimer. I rather just at least present what data is available as of now.
The city the incident took place in has a subreddit. Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself. It's a bit NSFW at the moment.
It’s not. It’s one video of unknown quality and relevance, picked somewhat randomly out of all the other available videos and data, the most relevant of which aren’t publicly available.
> Feel free to go take a look and judge for yourself
It’s the usual emotional coping through baseless speculation. There are healthier ways to deal with uncertainty amidst tragedy.
They have a RAT (ram air turbine) that deploys automatically under specific conditions. It’s basically a turbine providing electric and hydraulic power. It was almost certainly deployed on the accident flight. It will only power the most critical equipment, though. Possibly, that does not include the ADS-B transmitter (which broadcasts position and related data).
Yes and many pilots being walkie talkies in GA as backup. Not sure if airline pilots do this though. And its kinda hard to root around for it and fiddle with it while trying to keep an unpowered jetliner in the air. They're more for emergencies where the radio is the only problem.
By the way, the age old rule is "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate" in that order of priority. So it could be they just had their hands full with the Aviate part.
Well, loss of engine power and gliding to a stop is not that a far fetched case. Why is there not a fuel dump button to prevent a whole trips worth of fuel going up in flames?
Yes and smaller airliners don't have it. As I understand it, it's for the widebodies because they often have a higher maximum takeoff weight than maximum landing weight. Meaning that if they just took off and need to return right away they have a big problem. Because they're too heavy to land.
Most airplanes can dump fuel, but it's not an immediate thing, so not really applicable here (and obviously doing it over a city is to be avoided as well).
It's primarily needed for weight management in planes that can take off heavier than they can safely land. I.e. if the plane had enough control to abort the flight and return to the airport, then it might have been appropriate.
No. Most airliners CANNOT dump fuel. This capability is limited to long range wide bodies, like this 787. Neither the 737 nor the A320, which constitute the majority of commercial air traffic, can dump fuel. Fuel dumping is normally performed at an altitude where it should be able to evaporate before hitting the ground, and it takes a long time, maybe 15 minutes to get from full fuel to maximum landing weight. Using it would have made no difference to the outcome of the flight other than making a larger fire on the ground.
No. I said a larger fire, and I meant it. The fuel on the aircraft is not the only thing feeding the post-crash fire. Dousing the entire flight path with an accelerant would have resulted in many many buildings being on fire, instead of just a few of them.
They were only 600ft in the air, barely anything would have got out before they hit the ground and you'd have just set non-zero amount of innocent people on fire in all likelihood when the crash ignited the trail they'd left.
There is a dump fuel button if you're not in the middle of a populated city and you're far enough in the sky you've got a few minutes.
because painting an entire neighborhood in flammable fluid isn't safe... if it doesn't catch fire it'll corrode everything it touches.
most planes can't dump fuel anymore. if it's a serious enough emergency you land overweight. If it's not then you fly long enough to burn it off and land below max landing weight.
That makes no sense, and is not consistent with video evidence. Max flaps (40 degrees or so) are typically used only for landing. That is very obvious when you see it! Usual flap setting for takeoff is on the order of 5–15 degrees.
A 787 can still climb with flaps up and two healthy engines. In the video that was posted everywhere, you can CLEARLY hear the RAT spin, which gets deployed automatically when both engines go out.
It depends. It also gives the spin doctors time to do their thing, remove tracks etc.
For example, when MH17 was shot down by the Russian-backed rebels, they posted celebratory posts to twitter (they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport). Also, pictures of the actual SAM battery were taken as it was rushed back to Russia in the coverup. A few hours later all that got deleted and the spin machine started. "No, there were no Russian SAMs there", "it was a Ukraine fighter jet that shot it down", etc. They even fabricated fake radar tracks. People saying it was a SAM were denounced as conspiracy theorists, stuff like that. Only a year or so later when the official investigation started finishing up, the truth was confirmed.
In that case (as the investigation later proved) the earliest information was the most accurate. This is especially the case when there are powerful interests that don't want the truth to come out. Even Boeing covered up the first 737MAX crash.
That's why I think it's not a bad idea to read all the speculation. But keeping in mind that there is no definitive answer until the official accident report comes out. Any of the speculation could be true. Or even none of it.
And really, getting it 100% accurate in my mind is not something that matters. I just read it as an aviation enthusiast (and ex-pilot). What matters is that the experts writing the report are accurate. And later admiral cloudberg who expertly translates all that into normal-people language :) Whether I have an accurate view of what exactly happened really does not matter in this world.
Also, in many cases it is already clear what happened, like that ATR recently that was in a flat spin. The part that isn't clear is how it got into that situation. But the "what happened" is also important and that is one of the things you can often read about early.
I mentally earmark a month and wait for something "official" or at least some expert analysis which can be confirmed. I'm not sure what the experts could discern from any video that's out there, but sometimes it's a lot.
I'm reminded of the crane collapse in Seattle that had pictures afterward and the pins were no longer in it. The expert analysis I had seen discussing it had said the pins don't just come out in a crane collapse, and where the join the sections the crane would be at its strongest. He was, of course, lit up by those with possible agendas saying "you can't speculate". He was right in the end.
So with the crane collapse it was interesting to see it all play out, but it's a matter of keeping perspective. There were literal pictures of the pins not being in place. Explanation that those pins should not be removed until later in the disassembly of the crane. Then there was the other "side" hurling accusations at him. Finally the official report.
Keeping perspective to me is that yes, I want to know what caused it. But I'm also interested along the way that some people/companies/govts seem to have a vested interest in shaping the story. So I don't run with any of it, but I try to remember who said what, even though nobody ever seems to be responsible for being batshit crazy.
I hate so much how whenever something bad happens there's a huge rush to come up with theories that place the blame on some group or ideology you already hated for unrelated reasons. I've stopped paying attention to the news in part because I don't like how disingenuously giddy people get whenever there's a mass-casualty event. I don't even mind morbid curiosity about death and suffering but nobody should ever see it as a benefit to their chosen group-identity.
The game theory problem is probably that if everyone does it you have to do it too.
Like I strongly support equals chances, but if I e.g. get discriminated against for being a white heterosexual male -> it kinda forces me to vote against it
But jumping to conclusions serves a variety of human emotional needs. And in an attention economy, that means it also serves a large industry's economic needs.
This is why I despise Trump-bashing. Not that I think he's a particularly great person or leader, but when everything going wrong in the world gets tied back to him, I know it's ideologically driven.
> Wait until the damn official report comes out. That's how long you should wait
For public discourse, one week is fine. At that point you usually have ground facts established. A common official understanding of the known knowns and unknowns is available, together with a good profile of the leading conspiracy theories that one can filter out.
I'm fairly sure a fraction of the "techbro" community has already decided its due to Indian programmers at Boeing, or Indian managers at AI, or some other Indian voodoo in India.
I was just watching something the other day about how jet engines have gotten more efficient and powerful over the last 50 years where commercial airliners really only need 2 engines. All 2 engine aircraft also have to be able to operate on 1 engine as well if there is a failure.
One has to wonder if this was a bird strike incident on both engines that maybe having 4 engines would have allowed the plane to circle back around.
Why would a flock of birds large enough to be ingested by both engines of a two-engined plane not also be large enough to be ingested by all four engines of a four-engined plane?
Like the b 52 bomber. I always liked them. We could convert them for passenger flights. Airlines could develop luggage pods that hang from the wings and the planes support mid air refuelling so that could help with turnarounds. They also have tail guns for even more safety. Also huge bay doors which will make getting on and off the plane much faster.
They also do if you go around the car with a knife and you stab them.
But it is somehow implied that the context of the comment is normal driving conditions.
Perhaps that comment could be reworded like:
>When driving on a highway, while not being pursued by the police, on planet Earth, with a road temperature below 200C, and not driving behind a van transporting nails with an open door that's dropping them on the road, why don’t all four tires on a car blow out at the same time?
That way people could get a better sense of what it is about.
In the 1980s a British Airways 747 flew through volcanic ash and lost all four engines. So just having more engines may not always be the solution, as in suitably unlikely circumstances you can still lose all of them.
(In that case they were at cruising altitude, so had time to handle the situation and relight the engines).
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."
It depends on what is causing the failure and how situation evolves. Let us take British Airways Flight 009 as example, the wiki says that all engines failed, all engines were restarted and engine number 2 surged again and was finally shut down. So even this awkward situation was relaxed a bit by the additional safety margin.
Most airlines avoid nowadays the invest into maintenance of four engines airliners. Others have prefer the additional transport capacity and margins. Lufthansa has it's own maintenance branch "Lufthansa Technik" and doesn't need to handle extra costs. Emirates needs the huge capacities of the A380.
PS: The 747 can and does - if necessary - ferry flights without passengers and only three engines. Not possible with twin engine planes.
I think it's more that they needed the prestige of having the biggest planes, offering a whole bedroom with shower etc. It goes well with their ultra luxury image.
If it's just about seats that can fly smaller ones with the benefit that they can operate more frequently and thus attract more transit passengers looking for a good connection. That's their main market.
An A380 is quite a hassle because most airports can't even handle one.
But does that rule apply during liftoff or only when it's in-flight? Based on the map it probably never got that much altitude, as it barely traveled 2*length_of_runway, and that's including the runway itself.
> does that rule apply during liftoff or only when it's in-flight?
Any time after it’s too late to abort takeoff.
Pilots should be able to “regain full control of the aeroplane without attaining a dangerous flight condition in the event of a sudden and complete failure of the critical engine…at each take-off flap setting at the lowest speed recommended for initial steady climb with all engines operating after takeoff…” [1].
A multiple engine aircraft maintaining flight on a single engine is vastly different to the same craft being able to complete a take off when an engine fails mid process.
Aircraft can land (in right circumstances) by gliding in sans power .. the same cannot be said for take offs.
If during your takeoff roll you lose one engine on a twin engine jet below speed V1[0], you reject the take-off. V1 is calculated for the aircraft such that above that speed you are able to safely take off and execute a go-around in order to land again on just that single engine.
Aborting above V1 is heavily discouraged because usually there's a strong risk of running off the end of the runway. Of course, if you lose both engines above V1, you're really in trouble and left without much choice.
But we don't know what happened with this flight so nothing I've said here should be taken as indicative of whatever went wrong in this case. It's purely information.
[0] Which depends on many factors including the type of aircraft, loading, weather conditions, state of the runway surface - for example, wet, or iced - etc., and needs to be calculated afresh for every take off.
Yeah in some cases rejecting after V1 is a better choice. If you're going to impact something anyway you'll be doing it with a slower speed and no vertical component in that case.
An airliner in the US did it and the pilot was praised for making that hard decision. Everyone walked I think. I forget which flight.
I've spent a few million line kilometres in a variety of airframes and understand that "designed to operate" through an event is not the same as "actually survives" that event.
There are many factors at play and things are complicated by unexpected failures.
Thank you for the video that demonstrates a pilot aware in advance of planned "engine failure" can cope with such an event in scheduled test conditions.
Pilots, aircraft engineers, and safety regulators also sit in aircraft.
The phrase "line kilometres" might indicate a smidgeon of aviation industry adjacency to some.
EDIT: Above and below comments appear to be low grade random sniping in bad faith.
There's a failure to address content and specifics and a straw assertion about "more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators", a claim that was never made.
At best I have the same insights as anyone that worked with 20 airframes for a few decades and staged them about the globe in that time.
EDIT2: Symbiote has deleted their problematic reply below that the first edit was made in response to. The michaelt reply came after the reply by Symbiote and is moot, all my statements are here, undeleted and unredacted.
I can reinstate the reply if you like, but michaelt made the same point moments after I did, and I preferred his "jargon" rather than my "fancy vocabulary".
I'd prefer if you addressed the content of my two comments above your https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44257232 and explain which part caused you to imply I believe myself to have "more insight than the pilots, engineers and safety regulators".
At no point did I claim that multiple engine aircraft cannot complete a take off on a single engine.
The statement I made:
> Aircraft can land (in right circumstances) by gliding in sans power .. the same cannot be said for take offs.
is about having _no_ thrust power during take off.
The other statement I made acknowledged that test pilots in planned and scheduled clear weather conditions often test aircraft with mock engine failures, then pointed out that this is very different to an unexpected failure during non test flights.
Yes, sometimes these things work out alright (as per your example), other times not so much.
Landing sans power is landing with no thrust (no functioning engine).
Completing a take off with no thrust isn't possible unless the craft is a glider, a hot balloon, or a ballistic launch .. taking off with a single engine is not "taking off sans power".
Maybe I'm overly strictly pattern-matching on the type of people that tend to use the phrase "one has to wonder"; but I don't think that's usually uttered from place of learning and exploration.
The last nine comments in this thread have had nothing to do with a plane crash; and entirely about a meta-discussion about a comment someone else made.
That is entirely where I'm coming from - plane designs from the past had longer wingspans and supported 4 engines. Engines have gotten more efficient and powerful so cross-ocean routes don't need 4 engines anymore.
So I was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2. The vast majority of airplane accidents happen at takeoff or landings, if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore.
Also I would venture that 99% of comments on public forums like this are from people without expertise. My expertise in this space is a curiosity about planes for a few decades, taking some actual flying lessons, and being generally interested in aviation to go to airshows, watch youtube content from pilots, etc. I probably have about the same aviation knowledge as an average HN person.
> was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2
Impossible to answer until we know the cause. If it was independent powerplant failures, then yes. If it was e.g. fuel contamination, pilots improperly shutting down the engine, some other crap failing, then no.
Speaking as someone with aerospace engineering and GA pilot experience.
Current speculation around the raising of flaps suggests that independent engine failures weren't the cause. Proper investigation with access to better data than grainy video will tell us if that is the case and why.
"4 smaller but equally efficient engines" feels like a unicorn though (we'll probably get to the point in future where four large engines are superior in efficiency to two of today's engines, but two large engines to that latest design will still be more efficient than four smaller ones...)
> "4 smaller but equally efficient engines" feels like a unicorn
With turbines, yes, for fundamental reasons. With electric motors, on the other hand, perhaps not, though not particularly relevant to a long-haul route like AMD-LON.
True. Also the electric/turboprop propulsion compromises like Heart Aerospace's that trade off the limitations of the respective powerplants by fitting pairs of both. But that's a different use case...
(I get to write about arrayed space thrusters in the day job too, but again, fundamentally different physics and goals...)
It's not only that engines have gotten more efficient and powerful, its that they have also increased the reliability.
The other issue is that 4 engines share almost all of the failure modes that 2 engines do. If you have 2 engines that fail that are on opposite sides of the aircraft, having 2 others isn't going to help as its likely a system failure in the aircraft or a fault in that particular model of the engine that could affect all of them.
For example, if you run of fuel or have a failure in the fuel delivery system, it's not going to matter if you have 2, 4 or more engines. The mistake is thinking the probability of a 4 engine failure is significantly less than 2 engine failure for all types of failures.
Larger jet engines are more fuel efficient than smaller ones, because larger diameters allow for more bypass air and therefore more fuel efficiency [1]. It is a function of size and a lot of the engineering goes into materials and designs to be able to increase size and maintain strength. So you simply can't make 4 engines that are as efficient as 2 large ones, and that is compounded by the significant additional weight (and drag) of the duplicated engine parts and mounting structures.
>if some of those can be avoided by having 4 engines for commercial aircraft, its a worthwhile idea to explore
Everything comes with tradeoffs. Adding more engines mean more complexity, more maintenance, more chance of single engine failures, etc. You don't want to introduce more failure modes than what you are trying to fix. The move to two engines for large aircraft and the evolution of ETOPS (Extended Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards) involved a lot of people considering a lot of scenarios. I can guarantee the "why not 4 engines" question has been studied extensively.
I am happy to acknowledge I had a completely wrong knee-jerk reaction to your phrasing, and incorrectly assumed your "One has to wonder..." was meant as a suggestion of a solution, instead of instance of thinking out loud!
> So I was wondering what if current plane designs had 4 smaller but equally as efficient engines instead of 2.
Smaller turbofan engines are less efficient than larger ones. This is because they have a lower bypass ratio - thrust generated by turning the big fan over the thrust generated by combustion.
I don't think there's ever been a double-bird-strike incident, though. And what dual engine failures I can think of are due to failure of a shared system (e.g. fuel exhaustion, c.f. Gimli Glider).
[Edit: yeah, yeah, forgot the Tom Hanks movie, sue me. I do wish folks would respond to the much more important point below, which isn't invalidated by a single data point though.]
Constructing solutions for multiple-mode failures like this is a bad engineering smell. Almost always the solution isn't actually helping anything, and often makes things worse in whatever metric you're looking at. In the example here, having four engines makes the chances of total thrust loss lower, but it doubles the chance of a single engine failure. And the literature is filled with incidents of theoretically-survivable single engine failures that led to hull loss as a proximate cause (generally by confusing or panicking the crew).
>Constructing solutions for multiple-mode failures like this is a bad engineering smell. Almost always the solution isn't actually helping anything
Selection bias
The lower the barrier to entry of the subject matter the lower quality the people discussing it. This crap is like the Kardashians for white nerds with stem degrees.
The people with the requisite dozen brain cells to common sense realize these problems are complex and keep their mouths shut.
But in the video of the plane taking off and crashing, there's no clear, obvious, or tell-tale "poof" of bird turning into exhaust as there often is in bird strikes.
> I don't think there's ever been a double-bird-strike incident, though.
What? It happens multiple times a year. They made a movie about a famous incident (US Airways Flight 1549). There's even events with four engine strike (Eastern Air Lines Flight 375).
Clear skies, no LiveATC but reports of single Mayday call, gear out but no flaps and no control inputs visible in the grainy video. Something has to go really catastrophically wrong with a modern jetliner for that to happen, like the very dense flock of birds in Korea with the 737 a couple of months back.
The very short intersection takeoff seems like a good hint (and terrible practice), but all gears and engines look kinda OK from the outside. If they‘d scraped something on takeoff hard enough to take out both engines, there’d probably be some visible damage, or at least some gears sheared off.
EDIT:
Fully agree with the speculation in light of tragedy comments, but aviation is a bit of a special case. The reason it’s so safe is because an awful lot of people immediately start looking into potential reasons and then spend years getting to the bottom of it. The initial speculation is like an exercise: what could have happened? What if I’m in that situation, and need to act now, without knowing much of anything? If you do that a couple of dozen or hundred times throughout your life, it really builds a foundation for when an actual emergency ever happens to you.
It’s a bit like the reason most flight attendants in the emergency exit jump seat across from you won’t talk with you during the actual takeoff and landing: they‘re mentally walking through a potential emergency and what they‘d then need to do. Every single time. So if it ever happens, there‘s muscle memory, 10000x over.
EDIT 2: see the Flightradar24 comment below, it looks like they did backtrack and use the full runway.
That is normal and standard procedure if you're having issues lifting the plane, because retracting the gear means _increasing_ drag for a crucial 10/15 seconds as the doors open and thus slowing the plane further.
> but no flaps and no control inputs visible
Standard Dreamliner operating procedure, you take off at flaps 10 or 5, they are barely visible from the outside, see many random videos of 787s takeoffs on Youtube like this:
> That is normal and standard procedure if you're having issues lifting the plane, because retracting the gear means _increasing_ drag for a crucial 10/15 seconds as the doors open and thus slowing the plane further.
Oh fascinating! I would not have considered that but it totally makes sense.
True on both counts, was a quite early comment and initially thought they're coming back in to land vs barely having taken off. Only leaves control inputs but given how short the video is it could also be that there simply wasn't much to input/correct anymore despite the slight rocking.
Can't edit anymore, but the general gist of catastrophic failure needed to prevent a 787 from climbing out of this situation still holds.
I don't think you'd expect any control inputs in that scenario. They were level with a reasonable pitch angle. Aircraft attitude was fine, they just didn't have enough power to arrest the descent. Such a loss of power with a full load of fuel definitely indicates a swift catastrophic failure to the engines at least.
Regarding the intersection takeoff, Flightradar24 just tweeted this:
> We are continuing to process data from receiver sources individually. Additional processing confirms #AI171 departed using the full length of Runway 23 at Ahmedabad. RWY 23 is 11,499 feet long. The aircraft backtracked to the end of the runway before beginning its take off roll.
An intersection takeoff is a takeoff where you do not use the full length of the runway. When you are a large aeroplane with a full load, reaching the necessary takeoff speeds required to rotate (pull up and begin lifting from the ground) can take longer than normal, at which point the climb speed will also be reduced if not properly compensated for (e.g. you miscalculate something and set the wrong elevator trim/takeoff thrust/something else).
When you are taking off, you have a short portion of the runway which you can use to abort the takeoff depending on failures, but that portion can become even shorter depending on the length of the runway.
Usually the first part of takeoff you would abort for almost any reason, and the second part you would only abort in a serious emergency, once you reach a certain point you simply cannot afford to abort because you will not stop in time to crash into whatever is at the end of the runway at which point you must take-off even if you are going to immediately request an emergency landing afterwards.
So if you are heavily loaded, with a lot of people on board, and you do an intersection takeoff, you are taking a risk that if you made a mistake or something goes wrong you will not have the ability to safely recover. That's why it's a terrible practice in this case. All it does is save a little bit of time which would be spent taxiing to the actual start of the runway.
Why is it a thing? Everything else in aviation seems to have good amounts of checks, balances and buffers. It feels the same to me as skimping a couple percent on fuel or doing less frequent maintenance. Both also reduce turnaround time.
Depends on the circumstances. Probably not the case with a jet like a 787, but sometimes ATC will allow small planes to 'cut the line' with an intersection takeoff.
This runway was over 2 miles long. If you are in a smaller commuter prop plane or small jet, you don't need half that space for the takeoff. You call up ATC and they give you the option of taking off at an intersection now, or being #15 in line behind the heavies, its totally fine to do that if you are within the operating margins of the aircraft. The pilots have already done the math to know exactly how long of a runway they need for the worst case scenario (rejected takeoff just below V1), so if they know that they need 5k feet worst case scenario, and are offered an intersection takeoff with 7k feet of an 11k foot runway, there is already pretty big margin built in.
The thing to remember is that the aviation community and manufacturers have decided that once a jet is past a certain speed, you are committed to taking off and climbing out no matter what is going on. There is no circumstance where airliners will go beyond that speed and then try to reject the takeoff, and land back on that same runway.
As far as fuel, you might be distressed to know that you rarely fly with full tanks. They typically fly with the amount of fuel their route uses for the load they have + a margin for diversion. This is both a cost savings measure, as well as an operational concern (for example at Denver during a hot summer day, a lot of planes can't be loaded to maximum weight and still be able to do a rejected takeoff)
Good question. False sense of routine, experience? Definitely a pet peeve.
Was flying as a passenger on a really small airline (8 seater plane, Green Air) out of San Jose in Costa Rica. We got cleared for takeoff ahead of a United 737, at most 500 feet into the humongous runway for that plane. Yet the pilots still put in the 2 minute effort to taxi back to the beginning of the runway, even though they could have easily taken off from where we entered it. Don’t know if it was their protocol or the pilots decision, but I will trust this airline for a very long time.
Pilot here: even in my small Cessna I will backtrack do you know why? Because it gives me that money more options to work with in case something goes wrong with my take off.
If something large had just taken off ahead of you, it was probably not safe to go anyway. Wake turbulence can kill you. If you need to wait 2 minutes, why not back taxi? It'll feel like doing something vs nothing and you get the extra extra runway.
Usually some form of mis-management which in this case may have put pressure on the pilot to accept a shorter take-off option due to some minutes of time saved. Sometimes pilots also might get their priorities wrong. There's a concept of "get-there-itis" which is also a common cause of crashes but it's currently unclear if it was a factor in this case.
I imagine in a while we will all be able to read the investigation reports, since the aircraft crashed shortly after take-off the black box recorder should contain all the information we need to figure out most of what happened including possibly the reasoning for the decision to make an intersection takeoff.
Less time on runway means more throughput for a given buffer time between planes or larger buffer for a given throughput.
Now, obviously there's a discussion to be had about where the line is and what should and shouldn't be standard operating procedure but there's basically no safety improvement to have even a fully loaded 757 or Learjet or whatever drag it's butt to the very end of a 15000ft runway.
A pilot may be trying to scoot out of there ASAP because he knows based on the radio and who's where that's gonna make everyone else's jobs a little easier. An airport is run by professionals all of whom are trying to make things run smooth. It's at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from a school or Starbucks parking lot.
„Runway behind you“ is drilled into your head as one of the useless things in aviation. You always want to make sure to use the most runway available to you, exactly for cases when something happens. Hypothetical in this case: you realize something’s wrong with the plane, but you’re already too fast and close to the end of the runway to reject the takeoff because you wouldn’t be able to stop in time anymore.
Large airports with heavy traffic sometimes have operational constraints to send a plane out ahead of another from some intersection, but if the ADSB data is correct, taking off from half the available runway in a fully loaded 787 isn’t a good idea. You just give up a ton of margin for errors.
it means using less then the full length of runaway available. I'm not a pilot but i'm guessing that it's not good because it adds an unnecessary potential complication to the take off.
The engines power the hydraulic actuators in an aircraft an aircraft of that size cannot be trivially controlled without that hydraulic system. The APU should have been started to provide backup power in the case of engine failure but during take-off there is already very little time to do anything and it's possible that the sudden workload overloaded both the pilot and copilot or some other human factors were involved.
That being said, in the video I saw, the aircraft was already going too slow to realistically recover. And all you would get at that point is just an extended duration of glide which at best would let you find a less populated area to crash into.
You can hear what sounds a lot like the very distinct sound of the RAT having been deployed in one of the videos. There is also no main turbine sound. This really seems like dual engine failure, for whatever reason.
I saw you mentioning this but the RAT on the 787 sticks out of the bottom and should have been visible at around :04 seconds into that video when the aircraft silhouette is visible clearly against the background.
Although it's possible I am just missing from the video. You are right that the sound is quite distinct and can be clearly heard in the video.
The RAT is surprising tiny on the 787, and this is a phone video of a monitor, then run through Reddit compression. I am of course not 100% sure about any of this.
Yeah I saw that picture and came back here. I think you are 100% right that the RAT is deployed.
From the video of the runway it also seems like the aircraft didn't do a short takeoff (ADS-B location data is always crappy on the ground in my experience so this is entirely unsurprising).
There was a "smoke cloud" from behind the left engine which could also have just been a dust cloud right after rotation.
The flaps allegedly could be at only 5° (which is why they're so hard to spot) because of the runway inclination.
Air conditioning is powered by bleed air from the engines (or the APU or a ground source). The APU wouldn't be running during any normal flight, it's normally only ever used on the ground when the engines are off and there's no external power source.
So I am not sure what you are trying to say here, sorry.
I don't really know enough about this, but what would you expect the pilots to do with that control if they don't have any thrust? Unless there was a suitable landing spot very, very close I don't see what they could do even if they have full control of the plane. There is nothing they can do except getting the engines to work to avoid a crash, the only thing controls would give them is the option to choose a slightly different place to crash.
But also how long after take off do you retract the flaps? Can it be a pilot error (took off without flaps?). It happened more than once in the past, though I thought a modern plane like the dreamliner would make that mistake nearly impossible.
I'm told not to speculate, but I'm going to do it anyway because this video clearly shows there was an issue going to full thrust. It's an extremely rare dual engine failure or pilots' error not calling up full thrust to keep it flying. Very possible this is the famous bird strike issue Capt. Sullenburger experienced in 2009.
But doesn't seem like a bird strike issue here, right? And given the rarity of a dual engine failure, seems to point to not calling up full thrust? But seems to me that this kind of error would be more common without any technical safeguards?
It's interesting that up to about 30s in the video you can see the plane climbing normally, then it loses power and starts falling, about 10s after take off.
Apparently the pilot radioed "Mayday…no thrust, losing power, unable to lift!” 11 secs after takeoff.
It would seem to fit with a bird strike on both engines. Or contaminated fuel I guess. The stuff about flaps seems irrelevant.
Quite likely this and Jeju Air crash in Korea and Sully landing in the Hudson were all caused by bird strike taking out both engines.
It looks like it was fast enough that most people on board probably didn't realize they were about to crash, or they crashed within seconds of the realization. As torturous as that must have been, it was thankfully very very brief.
Flightradar24 reports that this occurred immediately after takeoff:
Initial ADS-B data from flight #AI171 shows that the aircraft reached a maximum barometric altitude of 625 feet (airport altitude is about 200 feet) and then it started to descend with an vertical speed of -475 feet per minute.
“Thirty seconds after take off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly,” said Ramesh, speaking to the Hindustan Times. He said he “impact injuries”, including bruising on his chest, eyes and feet but was otherwise lucid and conscious.https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...
You ~cannot~ don't want to "bail just before impact"
A plane at takeoff is pressurized, and that pressure holds the doors closed, as well as the physical locks. You cannot open it.
Don't believe random reddit comments. Average people know less than nothing about planes.
Speaking of random people knowing less than nothing: I believed that at takeoff and landing, planes were slightly overpressurized to increase airframe rigidity. I think I got that impression from a very old pilot, so either it used to be true or it was never true and I'm just wrong.
This person probably did not bail out of the plane in order to survive, but maybe you COULD open the doors at takeoff and landing, not that you want to.
Additional edit: I've actually flown a few times while running the barometer on my phone for funzies. I might be able to find a log of data to confirm or deny my mistaken belief! It's fun to do because you can see the pressurization increase signalling that the pilots are preparing for descent even before they tell you!
The pressure inside is not more than atmospheric pressure at the ground. In fact I think they only maintain the pressure of around 1000m or so. There would be absolutely no point pressurising the cabin higher than atmospheric pressure at sea level and if they did you'd feel it before the plane took off.
A Boeing Whistleblower engineer had warned of premature failure of this Boeing 787 Dreamliner and had asked US congress to bring down every single plane of this model type 1 year ago.
He died of “suicide” suspiciously right after.
I hope Boeing gets investigated for failure after failure after failure, and crashes it has caused recently.
He raised concerns on many issues including the fuselage issue
>Salehpour, who has worked at Boeing for more than a decade, says he faced retaliation, including threats and exclusion from meetings, after raising concerns over issues including a gap between parts of the fuselage of the 787.
That particular issue you quote, was only given as a single example
I guess it’s kind of surprising in a relatively new plane, but I encounter non functional entertainment systems relatively often. They’re not treated like the safety critical systems by any airline
I thought the same but he implies that the screens were not the only tech not working (AC, seats damaged).
It is quite an intuition to decide to leave a plane in such a moment. He just escaped death and is now aggressively attacked for saying something potentially relevant.
He did not leave the plane, he said he was on the previous flight from Delhi to Ahmedabad, before the plane then went on to do the Ahmedabad - London flight when it crashed. You can see his flight ticket in the tweet.
India is a large country, so a plane travelling a route like Delhi→Ahmedabad→London isn't unusual, with passengers able to board and disembark in Ahmedabad.
(There may also be security rules like requiring continuing passengers to disembark with their hand luggage before reboarding. I don't know, it's 15+ years since I took a flight like this.)
Air India has a long history of poor maintenance. Not many crashes, but lots of reports of poor cabin maintenance, broken electronics, air conditioning not working, etc.
"No correlation between non-functional displays on passenger seats & possible engine failures etc."
No. No no no. This is wrong, mistaken thinking.
A minimum standard of operations and attention to detail must be adhered to for high consequence / life critical endeavors and that behavior (culture?) must be enforced at all levels throughout the operation.
Ignore this heuristic at your peril - as either a consumer of these services or a provider who must demand high performance from your workforce.
Remember: flight attendants have (rarely exercised) critical health and life safety responsibilities. What messages do they internalize if this is the fourth flight in a row the coffee maker has been cracked and out of order ?
It’s wildly unrealistic to expect maintenance to fix 100.0% of issues, and to fix them immediately at that. There’s a balance to be struck with on-time performance that will naturally prioritize safety critical maintenance while postponing cosmetic repairs until they can be performed without schedule pressure.
Airlines are large and heavily regulated organizations, and passenger amenities (once successfully certified) might just not be in the loop for mandatory maintenance cycles and certifications.
Maintenance of IFE units vs. avionics or the airframe itself might as well be performed by completely different contractors, maintenance crews etc.
Sure, nice brown M&Ms type relation. But I've encountered entertainment systems failures on Virgin, Emirates, Qatar and they're all among the safest airlines according to this https://airlinelist.com/
The M&Ms were for cases where the show was likely to be considerably more demanding than what the venue normally handled, and they needed to make sure that the people running the place actually stepped up for it.
The organizations doing aircraft maintenance are always handling life-critical stuff. You don’t need a weird test to see if they’re paying attention.
It’s not like this stuff is just decided ad hoc and planes fly with broken IFE equipment because of bad culture. This stuff is worked out by engineers and regulators. There’s a list of stuff that needs to be working for the plane to be allowed to take off. If something on that list isn’t working, you don’t fly, even though the plane may be perfectly capable of it. And I guarantee the IFE equipment isn’t on that list.
Frequently broken passenger amenities indicate bad customer service but it doesn’t reflect on safety.
This was crew of AI171.
Next time you're on a flight please take a moment to thank the pilots, CISF staff and cabin crew for all they do to keep us safe.
The plane crashed shortly after takeoff in a populated area. Dropping 100 tons of fuel or tanks on buildings is not good.
Large jets can usually dump fuel but this is something that takes time. It's sometimes used in less urgent situations where the plane can still fly safely, like a landing gear malfunction or single engine failure.
Sure, if you don't want your wings anymore. The wings are the primary fuel tanks. You can drain the fuel out during flight but the process can take hours.
There is a fuel drain button, it's just slow. Google "fuel jettison". Sometimes you have to make an emergency descent and the plane is too heavy (or too dangerous to carry so much fuel). From the ground it would look like "chemtrails". You can look up videos of this on YouTube.
Any discussion about causes is going to be pure speculation right now. It's too early. But the Wiki article is pretty good to get an overview. Some interesting discussion on its talk page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Air_India_Flight_171
There's a better, longer video on Reddit. At the beginning of the video, it sounds like the Ram Air Turbine (RAT) is deployed, which would suggest a dual engine failure.
I'm assuming the Ram Air Turbine gives extra evidence of a dual engine failure (or at least the engine that generated power). Engine spools down, power is lost, air turbine needs to be deployed.
Those things are tiny and very transparent (since it's pretty much a propeller) and video compression, plus it's a video of a screen, will eat it up against a clear sky.
jesus, that's terrifying. The pilot has control of the plane all the way down but nowhere to even attempt a landing. All he can do is raise the flaps, deploy the landing gear and hope for the best.
Although TBH it also seems like a failure of city planning, aren't most major airports outside of the limits of the city they're associated with because of stuff like this? I know most of them don't have anywhere safe to attempt an emergency landing immediately after leaving the runway but at least there aren't a bunch of homes and office buildings.
No, they’re not. Of the 20 largest airports in the US, all but one of them have homes and offices surrounding them. The one that doesn’t is Denver, that’s mostly only because Denver’s airport is relatively new and the development hasn’t reached it yet.
I'm sure this is an airport most of the people on this site are familiar with but just in case you aren't, it's on reclaimed land in the San Francisco bay.
It is 400m from the threshold of 19L/1R to the nearest residential neighborhood at SFO. LGA, which is an incredibly urban airport has the exact same distance from the end of its closest runway to the nearest residential area.
Most major airports were established long ago (sometimes centuries ago) in land that used to be remote. Cities eventually expand into the surrounding area.
They put airports where there is room to put them. Frequently that means that they are well outside cities since finding space for a few 2 mile runways in the city is difficult.
However, there are plenty of airports in major cities and built up areas (in both developed and developing countries), and I have never heard of avoiding building in areas due to the (remote) possibility of crashes.
This is India we are talking about. The population density and surrounding encroachment is usually why even small domestic cylinder blast could take lives of 100s.
Given the fake news that came out of India after Sindoor, with the government insisting no fighters were lost even after third-party confirmation from France and the US, I'm hesitant to believe a purported "sole survivor" silver lining narrative when the only evidence is a few still photos and some brief video clips, especially in the age of AI.
FlightRadar24 shows them doing an intersection departure with only half the runway.
Assuming this is accurate I would think this is a terrible idea in a large, heavy aircraft (and I realize they might not have been heavy for this flight).
When I was flying I would regularly hear airliners refuse intersection departures past a few hundred feet from the end of the runway due to company SOPs.
Baseless speculation and very unproductive comment. At least show some takeoff calculations and perhaps don't speculate with confirmed unreliable ADS-B data
“Now you know why.” - why even respond like this? You took some general statistics not specific to the population of people who are whistleblowers and just matter of factly make it a truth. It’s about as ridiculous as saying the person is murdered without any proof which I guess aligns with your thought process.
Being a whistleblower is ostracizing. Your colleagues and friends might no longer associate with you. It may put you in financial and family stress. You are in the news, you need to testify potentially. Sounds like a high stress situation.
I don’t know what is fact or fiction in this case but I can also assume some percentage of the population that do decide to become a whistleblower may also have other stresses or crises going on that maybe further their motivation to become a whistleblower. I say this cautiously because I don’t know this case specifically.
The why respond like this is because you lack citations and provided an opinion that is not intuitive. Enlighten us instead of speaking like it’s all fact and share sources. You only stated suicide rates in the over 60 group and did not mention whistleblowers. You are again speaking on such authority without citing your supposed well known data.
I have looked before and have never seen specific studies on suicide rates in whistleblower groups but there is an awful lot of studies suggesting higher rates of depression and suicidal thoughts. Again I don’t know this case well but until there is evidence of murder it feels like MAHA feelings instead of science. I can think of a number of cases in recent history where the whistleblower has committed suicide, everytime people talk about it being murder but zero proof. Happy to be corrected but also tired of conspiracies.
Serious response: COMAC, the "Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China" (1) are working on it, but the competitor C929 aircraft (2) is not expected before 2030.
And they have produced smaller aircraft (3), but but the numbers produced so far are not impressive.
In other words, you're correct that it's not "if" but "when". And that it's a hard task, but they are working on it. The Jet engines seem to be the major hurdle.
Temu is in a great position to enter this market. Being deeply connected to the supplier networks, they could easily put together a plane and become a competitor to Boeing.
Just my personal observations of the video, I'm in no way qualified to speak on the matter.
There's a large plume that looks like smoke to me looks like smoke (could be dust/sand being blown away but I wouldn't think you'd see that much from a busy runway) visible off the left side of the runway. The plane is obscured by that structure when it happens but it looks like it's created at the same time that the plane is leaving the ground.
It looks like the plane stops accelerating completely at that same moment without any change in orientation which, in my head, looks like both engines suffered total failure at the same time.
From my limited knowledge (mostly from Mentour Pilot YT videos), that seems consistent with what you'd see if the plane flew through a large flock of birds that are spread out enough that both engines would be hit at the same time.
Again, purely speculation on my part based solely on what I see in this 1 video.
It surely can’t be a coincidence that the sole survivor was sat next to the emergency exit. I still can’t fathom how he walked away from that, though. Or even got out the plane alive.
And there were 7 in one year during 2018 and 2019.
Looking through the chart you linked, averages around 3 per year. Considering how many planes are currently in the sky at this very moment, this is a wildly useless statistic used to cause fear and panic.
> Looking through the chart you linked, averages around 3 per year.
> this is a wildly useless statistic used to cause fear and panic.
I can read too. I added a comment with a number. You don't know my intent, this is your interpretation.
Besides, 2018/19 was a steep outlier with the 737 MAX crashes. This is why these got widespread attention and have been discussed down to the last detail for years.
Anecdotally there seems to be a bit more air traffic in around Chicago versus 2019, but perhaps I just notice flights overhead more now as I commute downtown far less. This site shows current ORD volume at roughly 2019 levels:
A sad case. Once they find the data boxes and inspect the data and voice records of the crew they might arrive at an answer. Unlike the USA, India as well as China prioritise political aspects above facts. This leads to the danger of hidden facts that show any officer is at fault. They also have a rigid hierarchy so if a senior officer makes an error, a junior officer dares not correct him and cause the senior to lose 'face'. This has caused plane crashes in India/China in the past.
Indian Alien here. I'd suggest more sleep. I would bet a fair amount of $ that average scores of Indian kids who take GRE / SAT would be higher than citizens born in, ahem, God's Own Country. Admittedly, those would be kids from the middle / upper middle class. To afford pilot school you'd need to be from those sections anyway, or from the air force. So I'd not consider language to be a factor here. Although as the top comment says, wait a week or two. Or maybe more.
Off topic, as someone who travels to India 1-2X per year .. it's more common to see women Indian pilots. I'm only mentioning this unusual stat as your comment shows a kind of regional bias.
you don't have to doubt :) , English proficiency is the norm in professional jobs in India. Not to native levels but certainly more than sufficient for jobs like a pilot.
The previous poster could have worded their comment much better, but shoddy maintenance, dodgy fuel etc absolutely are a real issue in developing countries.
Air India has a reasonable safety record, but in most all other aspects they're widely recognized as being a shambles.
Anyone with a reasonable amount of exposure to physics in the region has been witness to innumerable Bollywood documentaries that illustrate the many gravitational anomalies present in the vicinity of the subcontinent.
Probably another example of slipshod Boeing engineering failing to anticipate the gravitational and mass related endemic conditions. They should have done more testing.
I think he's implying that countries near the equator are underdeveloped and thus the crash could have been caused by human factors (such as negligence)
As opposed to the predictable accidents of the Amazon and Guyanan basins?
Apart from the casual racism of lumping together areas of three continents in your generalisation, it was lazy racism as at 23 degrees North, Ahmedabad is close in latitude to Florida and far outside the 5-10 degree equitorial zone.
Latin America doesn't have as much high end aviation going on to fall out of the sky and the factions that are competing with the government for control in the new world are less inclined to slip explodey things onto flyey things than the ones in the old world.
I'm flattered you think I'm racist. I assure you I allocate my hate based on the contents of their mind than the color of their skin. I only have so much hate to go around and there's no reason to waste hate on people who don't need it.
Look at the population numbers. Look at the number of arrivals and departures of the kind of large "international newsworthy when they crash" aircraft. There is simply less chance one falls out of the sky in LatAm because there's many fewer of them in the sky to begin with.
>You're fooling yourself here. Your absurd (and factually incorrect) assumptions about whole regions is textbook racism.
You are projecting your own judgements into my words. These nations are poorer and a lot of baggage comes with that. None of which has anything to do with race.
> You are projecting your own judgements into my words.
No, I'm reading your words as you write them.
Deciding that Ahmedabad is "right on the edge" of the "the equatorial old world" is racist unto itself. It shows staggering geographic and cultural ignorance.
Some self-reflection is in order, because if you speak like this in real life, people may not call you out directly but everyone will think less of you.
I'm not a fan of Boeing, but let's not start pointing fingers yet. We know literally nothing about what caused the accident yet, and the 787
Dreamliner has a stellar record: it's been flying since 2011, with over 1000 in service, and I believe this is its first ever major accident.
Yes, I saw on news a pilot who regularly flies to this airport mention bird strikes as a potential cause given the bird problem in that area.
I'm very disappointed that in India this aspect is being ignored. It should stimulate local/state/central govt to solve the slum, urban garbage etc kind of problems.
737 Max also had stellar records and then they started crashing one after other. Boeing has earned this reputation. Also as per information from twitter pilot did called mayday immediately after takeoff, so high chance of technical issues in aircraft.
The two are not remotely comparable. The 737 MAX entered commercial service in mid-2017 and had fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, both with aircraft that were only a few months old, out of a total fleet in the tens of aircraft.
The US flys significantly more than any country in the world and operates the most Boeing airplanes including the 737 and 737 Max, yet there hasn't been a single major accident like this and the Max crashes in the US.
Are these planes not maintained to the same standards, are the pilots not trained on these types of planes as much as in the US?
You are comparing the US pop 350m (?) to rest of the world pop 8850m. Sure planes per capita are higher in US but it's an unfair comparison.
Not to say there isn't something there to dive into with data and some countries are safer than others to fly. And definitely some airlines than others.
Yeah, but the US puts significantly more miles on these planes and yet not a single accident has happened. So it's not the plane, unless these foreign airlines are getting the defunct planes. It has to be either poor maintenance or poor pilot training.
> American Airlines Flight 191 crashed shortly after lifting off the runway at Chicago O'Hare Airport [...] The accident was attributed to improper maintenance procedures. The crash resulted in the deaths of all 271 passengers and crew on board, as well as two people on the ground.
> American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, New York, just after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport bound for Las Américas International Airport, Santo Domingo. The first officer's overuse of the rudder in response to wake turbulence from a Japan Airlines 747 was cited as cause. All 260 people on board, as well as five people on the ground, died from the crash
What you're doing is running your mouth and implying there's some sort of magic that makes the USA -- probably the country you live in -- special. All other countries must obviously be inferior, incompetent, in comparison to the glorious USA.
That's not how planes work, that's not how aviation safety is advanced. There have been hundreds of accidents and there's no value in cherry-picking specific timeframes (while not actually stating you were cherry-picking until challenged on it), nor specific categories of accident (fatal accidents with hull loss only).
(and if you want to apportion geographic blame - for Boeing airframes only - check out pages 17-24)
When there are accidents, the right thing to do is to analyse how it happened, come up with findings that might reduce the likelyhood of it happening again, or eliminate it, and push all people in aviation to adopt those findings - whether it be manufacturer, ATC, airline, or pilot, and regardless of country.
I suppose US Airways 1549 wasn't American, then. I wonder what the 'US' in the name was for, then. If the bird strike had happened earlier in the flight where the plane would've had less altitude and speed, a very similar result to AI171 could've happened.
Or more recently, I suppose DCA isn't in the US either, and PSA Airlines isn't American.
This comment is subliminal racism disguised as thoughtful 'are these pilots not maintained to the same standards, are the pilots not trained on these types of planes', when the corrupt cesspool that is the US somehow churned out the disaster of an aeroplane system that was MCAS.
I'm not sure, my guess is maybe foreign pilots are less fimilar with Boeing planes. The reason for the Max crashes from the past was due to the pilots not getting enough training on the new plane and made assumptions about it based on the previous generation plane. It wasn't the actual plane that was bad it was Boeing training wasn't good enough for pilots to understand the changes they made.
