> “Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious,” he went on to say, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed by The New York Times.
> “I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” Mr. Forkner says in the messages.
I often tell struggling grad students a joke that was told to me when I was a struggling grad student.
"What do you call the guy who graduated at the bottom of his medical school class?
Answer: You call him "doctor""
The point being, no matter how difficult or important the job, performance across the range of people doing that job will be more or less normally distributed. 50% of surgeons will be in either the second or third quartile, eg they will be closer to "average" than brilliant. A quarter will be in the first quartile, ie mediocre.
Obviously this is just a feature of how statistics (and human performance) works. It is not necessarily anything to be worried about, and in fact unless those in the first quartile are "incompetent" (which I am using as an absolute and not a relative term meaning "incapable of doing the job") there's nothing that can or should be done about it. If you immediately fired those in the first quartile, all you would be doing is a) firing people capable of doing their jobs, and b) establishing a new first quartile with different people in it.
The new first quartile will be smaller than the old first quartile. Zeno would be pleased because if we take this to its limit, we'll eliminate the first quartile entirely!
When I was building certification tests at Microsoft, their version was, "We need to determine the minimally qualified candidate, and design the test so that they can pass."
It was horrifying at first, but now I think about it all the time in all my interactions. The person making my burger might be the Minimally Qualified Cook. What's the absolute minimum that I would want them to know for me to feel comfortable eating it?
Airline pilots have a significant chunk coming from the military (that's the cheapest way to pay for training and 1,500 hours of experience needed), so the culture has a lot in common with military aviation.
The key trait I'm thinking of here here is owning up to your mistakes and not trying to cover anything up. Making an honest mistake is almost never punished, to encourage people to come forward. The thinking is that known mistakes can be fixed, but unknown mistakes may put someone else in danger. If someone is worried about being punished then they might be less likely to come forward, and that can put lives in danger in the future. This is intended for things like over-G'ing a jet. If you pull too many G's then maintenance has to inspect everything, which makes them angry and takes the jet off the flying schedule. But it's better to do the inspection than to have the wings fall off when another pilot is flying the next day.
The end result of this culture is that military pilots (who then filter into the airlines) don't get punished for some things that you might think they would (such as being a little too forward). It would be better if he said something non-PC (like "I suck at flying") if the alternative is him being afraid to speak up.
When a pilot exhibits seemingly contradictory behavior, it can usually be traced back to a tradition or training. They are often very raunchy in private, but extremely professional over the radio. There are some rules that they break every day, but there are other rules that they won't break even if it means losing their job. Nobody wants to hear a pilot downplay their abilities, but I'd prefer an honest pilot to one who falsely believes they are superman. The fact is that roughly half of airline pilots are below average (of all airline pilots), and they usually get to where they are going safely.
But this guy was/is a chief technical pilot at Boeing, and probably knows this plane better than 99% of all airline pilots, so he was probably just trying not to sound like an overconfident jerk.
It's worse if other people believe the pilot is a superman, because then the pilot feels intense pressure to be superman, and so will go to great lengths to defend his actions as being perfect.
Seriously. An Airline Transport Pilot must:
* Have demonstrated precision flying, including precision power off landings, from a variety of altitudes and preconditions.
* Multiple demonstrations of a wide range of flying capabilities, including recovery from loss of navigation, systems failures, and unusual attitudes.
* Attained a 1st class medical certificate, which is actually quite challenging. Annual re-certification, and sometimes more frequently than that for pilots that have anything at all quirky going on in their body. This includes extensive health records (such as EKGs) sent to the FAA for analysis and includes relevant dental work. (Yes, pressure bubbles inside teeth can cause pilots to lose the ability to control an airplane.) Got a DUI? Pretty much eliminates flying for life.
* Attained a flight instructor's certificate. Almost all airline pilots were flight instructors before becoming airline pilots.
* 1500 hours flight experience, enough to all but guarantee in-flight emergency or systems failure will have occurred.
* 1000 hours jet experience.
* Attained instrument ratings, multi-engine ratings, etc.
* And that's just to get past the interview. Then the real training begins.
In all, that's a lot of training, and pilots pay about as much as a doctor to get that training. Since attaining a Private Pilot's license myself (which I found challenging and which ATPs consider kindergarten) I've realized that actual airline pilots are in general remarkably good pilots. Even if you, sitting in the back cabin, think the landing is rough, it's probably a really good firm precision landing considering the conditions.
Well sure, this particular guy almost certainly doesn't have any DUIs.
It's only the statement about DUIs preventing flying for life I was objecting to, if someone really wants to become a pilot a DUI isn't going to stop them.
And this is why lawyers absolutely hate it when you write anything in an email. If you ever get sued or subpoenaed, someone is going to comb through your messages and pick a few statements out of context that make you look terrible.
I had rather have this humility and not be worried, than having someone say that they are the best pilot. That would ring alarm bells because most of the brilliant people I have met are humble and seldom boastful. The mediocre ones are usually the loudest.
Exactly. A lot of skills have a level of depth that takes experience to truly understand. You can practice for years only to realise that it will take a life time of commited study.
Understanding that is a good sign of competence.
> No one wants to hear their surgeon on the record saying "I'm just an OK surgeon"
I would find such a statement reassuring, assuming that their colleagues rate them higher.
In my experience over the years working with various professionals, the ones who speak highly of their own abilities tend not to be exceptional. The exceptional ones tend to be skeptical of their own abilities.
I'm curious how an issue he experienced in the simulator relates to the problems that occur with MCAS. The known problems with MCAS occur when the active angle of attack sensor fails. Perhaps the simulation was simulating AoA sensor failure?
What's really sad is you need the lawyers to let the public know something went wrong. If people had listened to the engineers (admittedly internal vs external communication are completely different) then we never would have had this problem in the first place.
Lawyers often profit from the misery of others (I know many lawyers that do great things and are proud of their work, but almost nobody gets into law because they "want to make the world a better place"), but sometimes that misery can prevent other's misery in the future.
Sadly the profits aren't in putting anyone in jail, but in civil suits. I would love to be wrong, but nobody is going to jail over this because nobody will profit from it.
To be fair, engineering dialogue brings out concerns like this on many major programs. The lawsuits happen on the ones where the concerns turn out to have disastrous consequences.
I take it to mean he think there's an issue with the sim, not the real aircraft.
There's absolutely no information in what manner MCAS was misbehaving.
It's very possible this is being completely blown out of proportion.
Sarcasm/irony in text form can be difficult to figure out sometimes, but some people are better at it than others. This community as a whole seems to suck at it.
I think it's easy to understand sarcasm when you know who you're talking to, such as a group of friends or coworkers. But when you're part of a huge online community like hn that discourages humor, it's pretty easy to understand why people fail to recognize it - this community punishes sarcasm more often than it rewards it. And most of us are not talented enough at writing that we can make it easily understandable to a broad audience.
Even if they were prone to "crying wolf", I think it still would need follow up. I have customers that often complain about "bugs" that turn out to be as yet unimplemented features but I still have to track down the issue and verify it.
-->WRONG It seems that he retracted his statements. Was it even MCAS related at all? WRONG<-- Also, it's impossible that the simulator was simulating the sensor failure that caused the the MCAS problems which lead to the two crashes.
EDIT: Wait, there was no retraction. It's hard to tell from the NYT reporting, but the "lie" statement seems to be in reference to his sign-off on the removal of MCAS from pilot's manuals.
