
Asiana Airlines Flight 214: A Pilot’s Perspective - sheri
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/2013/07/asiana_airlines_crash_stop_blaming_sfo_s_runways_and_korea_s_pilots_for.html
======
edw519
Off topic but of significant hacker interest:

 _Also in 1985...the crash of a Delta Air Lines L-1011 in Dallas that killed
137._

There's always been a lot of speculation over how IBM gave up an entire
industry (the personal computer) to a seemingly insignificant start-up
(Microsoft). One theory is that may not have happened if Don Estridge hadn't
been killed in that crash. More about him here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Don_Estridge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Don_Estridge)

and here:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/05/us/philip-estridge-dies-
in...](http://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/05/us/philip-estridge-dies-in-jet-crash-
guided-ibm-personal-computer.html)

Of particular note:

"His most revolutionary move was to make the computer's design specifications
public, allowing thousands of young people to write programs for the machine."

We take it for granted now, but before Don Estridge and the IBM PC,
"proprietary" was the rule and "open" was the exception. RIP

~~~
vasundhar
Now I understood the policy not to book more than 4 employees on same plane.
RIP

~~~
ngoel36
I'm a former Google employee, they had a similar policy. There were no more
than x employees per team allowed on the same plane, above a certain seniority
level, only one per plane.

~~~
nostrademons
The irony is that there's no such policy for buses, which in many ways are
_less_ safe than planes. One catastrophic bus crash on the way to Tahoe could
conceivably wipe out most of search quality, or any other department.

~~~
chmars
Traveling by bus is surprisingly safe – measures in journeys and travel hours
even safer than air travel:

[http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/risks_of_travel.htm](http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/risks_of_travel.htm)

~~~
warfangle
Unless you take the notorious chinatown bus[0].

0\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_bus_lines#Safety](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_bus_lines#Safety)

------
LaGrange
This is a great article, with one exception:

 _There have been a handful involving regional affiliates, but the majors have
been virtually accident-free_

Now, I realize that even including those the stats are still fairly good, but
it makes the "virtually accident-free" stats of majors a result of spinning
off risk to affiliates, which is not something a consumer should care about.
It might be a bit of a nit-pick (as it's still a handful), but moving things
into different brands to avoid stigma is a common and, in my opinion,
unhealthy practice.

~~~
brown9-2
Could it be that rather than a distinction between the big airlines and the
small airlines, the author was attempting to make a distinction between
flights with large amounts of passengers (100-200+) and flights of smaller
size (50ish)?

I think the point is that there was a streak of 12 years with no fatal
incidents of a _large-size_ jet.

~~~
jcdavis
...in North America, which is just more fact-twisting by the author.

Lets not forget that 228 people perished when the flight crew of Air France
447 flew the plane straight into the ocean.

~~~
gonzo
If by "flew" you mean "stalled", then yes.

~~~
hga
Well, it wasn't your standard controlled flight into terrain, but since one of
the pilots was pulling back on his hand stick for the entire time.... (e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Sullenbe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Sullenberger)).

------
rossjudson
Great and sensible article. Read this because it "pops the bubble" of some of
the popular memes floating around, providing details on what it means to have
low hours in a type, or whether Korean pilots have "perceived seniority"
issues in the cockpit.

I note that checked bags cannot block passengers from escaping an aircraft.
Perhaps someone will someday quantify the additional risk airlines forced on
passengers when they started charging for every bag.

~~~
joezydeco
Patrick Smith wrote the "Ask the Pilot" column for Salon.com for 10 years,
ending last year. His writing was always very insightful and very entertaining
at the same time.

One of my favorites: [http://www.askthepilot.com/essaysandstories/the-
exploding-to...](http://www.askthepilot.com/essaysandstories/the-exploding-
toilet/)

It seems he came back to slate.com as a one-time thing, but you can read his
archived work at Salon and at www.askthepilot.com. He seems to have a book as
well now.

~~~
aterris
He also has a new book on Amazon that is basically the book version of his Ask
The Pilot column.

I actually just read it the other day and was pretty interesting (and a quick
read)

------
danso
> _But consider for a moment the year 1985, one of the darkest ever for
> commercial air travel. By the end of that year, 27 crashes had resulted in
> the deaths of almost 2,400 people. These included the Air India bombing over
> the North Atlantic, with 329 casualties, and, two months later, the crash of
> Japan Airlines Flight 123 outside Tokyo, with 520 dead. (These, the second-
> and fifth-deadliest incidents in aviation history, happened 49 days apart.)
> Also in 1985 were the Arrow Air disaster in Newfoundland that killed more
> than 240 U.S. servicemen, the infamous British Airtours 737 fire, and the
> crash of a Delta Air Lines L-1011 in Dallas that killed 137._

Wow, the number of fatalities that year is incomprehensible by today's
standards. Yes, this accident has made big news because so few accidents have
happened in this decade...but I'd say that today's news cycle has served to
amplify just about everything, no matter what their statistical, relative, or
absolute significance.

~~~
ekianjo
So it's ok to forgive Pilots' incompetence just because statistics say it
doesn't happen a lot?

~~~
potatolicious
This is orthogonal to the original argument, but _yes_ , we should forgive
pilot error, because mistakes are not necessarily a demonstration of
incompetence.

Life, and all subcomponents of life, is one giant ball of probabilities.
Training, preparation, and planning all go towards decreasing the probability
of undesirable events, but they do not rule them out entirely.

This includes plane crashes, car crashes, or even scraping your knee.

Professional football players don't play perfectly every game. Olympic
athletes still make mistakes despite years of daily training. And you still
have major bugs in your codebase - would you describe yourself as incompetent?

Mistakes happen. Accidents happen. So long as we can confidently determine
that it is accidental rather than systemic (i.e., incompetence), we learn from
it and keep going.

But nevermind all that. Let's hang a sign around their necks, parade them in
the streets, let people throw things at them, and then execute them publicly.

~~~
goodcanadian
Perhaps more to the point, no single error should ever destroy an aircraft. As
the parent points out, people make mistakes. This is not news, and good
systems (including aircraft) are designed to allow for that. So, even if pilot
error was a contributing factor, I find it very hard to believe that nothing
else went wrong. There were at least two people in the cockpit as well as
controllers on the ground. No one was worried until a few seconds before the
crash.

~~~
sokoloff
Agree that a single, simple error has little chance to down a modern transport
aircraft. It's almost always a chain of errors, each necessary but only
jointly sufficient.

I realize that not all the facts are in, and the NTSB full process will take
quite some time, but I believe that once all the facts are in, you will find
this to be a stunning display of lack of basic airmanship skills.

Why would no one on the ground warn the flight? The altitude transmitted to
ATC radar is in hundred foot increments and the high and fast on initial won't
trigger an alert, once they pull the power off and try to capture the
appropriate vertical profile, ATC radar has no information that anything is
wrong, then when they start blowing through the vertical profile, there's not
enough resolution to trigger a low altitude alert.

More fundamentally perhaps, it's not ATC's job to fly the plane. ATC keeps
planes separated; pilots fly them. On a clear-and-a-million day, and an 11,000
foot runway, the crew couldn't manage a visual approach. There was more than
one error, but I think the NTSB findings on probable cause will
overhwelminginly find the failures to be in the forward portion of the
aircraft, immediately behind the yokes. (It is hard to fathom.)

------
snowwrestler
> Early theories as to why a plane crashed almost always turn out to be wrong
> or incomplete.

In the Air France crash over the Atlantic, the early theories all centered
around the loss of airspeed indicators--a mechanical problem. When the flight
recorders were finally found (an astounding feat of salvage BTW), it turned
out that the airspeed indicators did fail...but then they came back online,
and the pilots flew a perfectly good aircraft into the ocean anyway.

So as we look at this SFO crash, the lessons from Air France are mixed. On the
one hand it's possible that the early theories of pilot error will be wrong,
and it will be some subtle or previously unknown software or hardware error.
On the other hand we know that modern highly trained pilots _can_ make enough
wrong decisions in a row to crash a sound airplane.

~~~
bedhead
The behavior of the co-pilot was so incomprehensibly baffling in this crash.
Pulling back on the stick is like an economist mixing up supply and demand
curves. I dont think anyone has ever been able to figure out why the co-pilot
never thought to stop pulling back.

The depressing part of that transcript is immediately after the co-pilot tells
the pilot he's been pulling back on the stick the whole time - the pilot
instantly knows it's all over and that he's got a couple seconds to live, and
that it was such a stupid error that got them there. It's horrifying.

~~~
will_asouka
> I dont think anyone has ever been able to figure out why the co-pilot never
> thought to stop pulling back.

Under the normal fly-by-wire control law, constant back stick wouldn't stall
the aircraft. The computers would stop pitching the aircraft up before it
reached the stall angle of attack. But, the system had dropped to Alternate
law which is a reversionary measure, in this case caused by the pitot system
failing. Under Alternate law, high angle of attack protection is lost and you
can pitch up into a stall.

That said, in the AF447 case, the suspicion is that the F/O never even
appreciated they were in a stall, irrespective of Alternate law being active.

~~~
bedhead
It's still a mystery why they couldn't comprehend that they were in a stall
though. The captain did the math when the co-pilot told him he'd be pulling
back the whole time: descending rapidly plus nose up = they were in a stall.
He recognized this instantly.

The only explanation is that sometimes the brain just goes haywire during
incredibly intense moments. Like pedal misapplications in cars, when people
frantically try to brake but jam the accelerator instead, it never seeming to
click in their heads that they're speeding up, ie pressing the wrong pedal.

------
ColinWright
Single page:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/2013/07/asiana_airlines_crash_stop_blaming_sfo_s_runways_and_korea_s_pilots_for.single.html)

------
zaroth
Just like Patrick Smith thinks it's rash to indite the pilots of Flight 214
before we have all the data, I'd ask Pat to do the same for the victims, ahem,
passengers.

I don't think the emergency exit was some walk down the isle where a few
people stopped to reach under their seats and grab their carry-on to save the
inconvenience. From the pictures I saw of the cabin, the seats were torn
loose, piled up on top of each other, and there was no 'center isle' left.
However, it does seem that the condition of the cabin after the plane came to
rest was _highly variable_ depending on where you were sitting.

For all we know, passengers that were seen carrying bags outside the aircraft
could have had to throw those bags down the chute to clear the egress. Or
maybe they were in a state of panic and shock and were running on autopilot
(if only the plane had landed that way).

I do think Patrick is on to something, that the increased level of automation
makes it more likely that when the automation isn't there to help that
accidents will happen. What I still don't get is flying 30 knots too slow on
approach should have been ringing alarms all over the place, including in the
tower, and yet no one noticed?

~~~
Shank
I agree - I think a little more than the instrument landing system was offline
during that period of time. Surely ATC had them on radar and could have easily
seen them coming in way too slow to properly land.

~~~
cpncrunch
That's not ATC's job. A pilot should be able to land the plane himself/herself
in visual conditions.

------
nilkn
FlightAware has radar data chronicling the crash:
[https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAR214/history/20130706/...](https://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAR214/history/20130706/0730Z/RKSI/KSFO/tracklog)

The NY Times made a nice graph with it:
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/07/us/asiana214-u...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/07/us/asiana214-uneven-
descent.html?ref=us&_r=2&)

~~~
frenchman_in_ny
The FlightAware data isn't particularly accurate, and the update frequency
nowhere near fast enough to get good information (vs. FDR).

For the less sensationalist view of the crash and analysis, see the AVHerald
information [1]

[1]
[http://avherald.com/h?article=464ef64f&opt=0](http://avherald.com/h?article=464ef64f&opt=0)

------
neurotech1
I have to say I think the conclusion that this isn't related to the Korean
Airlines mishap series is mistaken. KAL Cargo Flight 8509 [1] was the last KAL
crash, when cultural reasons turned a instrument malfunction into a fatal
crash, because a junior FO wouldn't speak up when a Senior Captain(Colonel
RoKAF) over-banked the 747, and crashed.

One thing that surprises me is that the same personality trait that crashed
8509, would make them a lousy flight lead as well, not to mention a lousy
Squadron CO or Wing CO. If the pilots in the squadron aren't comfortable
raising safety issues with their CO, then sooner or later, a crash will
happen.

It's not just a foreign issue, poor safety culture lead to the VFMAT-101 crash
in San Diego, where 4 people on the ground died[2]. The CO of VR-1 (Fleet
Logistics Squadron/VIP transport) got canned for poor command climate [3],
which caused a few safety issues, then fudging her NATOPS flight proficiency
paperwork. A more "balanced" CO would have realized that flying the checkride,
staying fully current would have been easier, and certainly better for safety
climate.

IMO(Former pilot): Based on reports, the Pilot Not Flying(PNF/Experienced FO)
didn't inform the veteran Captain that he was significantly slow by 500 ft,
which could be considered the "waveoff window"[3] for landing a 777 on a
runway, even when on a visual approach. Others have pointed out the
regulations requiring a go-around for a visual approach are vaguely worded as
"when required" without specifying the conditions. Some pilots take that the
regulations literally, and believe that a visual approach doesn't require a
decision altitude, call-outs or a stabilized approach. It does require to
pilots to be safe, and is often required by company Operations Manuals.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_San_Diego_F/A-18_crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_San_Diego_F/A-18_crash)

[3]
[http://www.navytimes.com/article/20120916/NEWS/209160317/UAV...](http://www.navytimes.com/article/20120916/NEWS/209160317/UAV-
s-longer-wave-off-window-could-pose-threat)

~~~
cpncrunch
I believe it's up to the airline to have a go-around policy for unstabilized
approaches. Westjet, for example, requires the approach to be stabilized by
1000 feet. An unstabilized approach is a major causal factor in the majority
of landing accidents (according to IATA research). I know which airline I
would rather fly on.

~~~
neurotech1
Yes, Its up to the airlines. 500ft to be stablized is relatively safe. 1000ft
is a little safer margin, but not having a stabilized visual approach
procedure is definitively risky at best, and sometimes fatal.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1455](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1455)
is an example of an experienced crew making unstable approach and landed high,
then overran the runway and crashed. 500 ft for Southwest pilots to be "in the
slot" or go around.

~~~
cpncrunch
I agree 500ft is fine too. The important thing is to have some SOP for a
stabilized approach, and for it to be monitored by the company. I suspect
Asiana isn't doing this, but I guess we'll find out.

------
yread
> It’s not yet clear which Asiana pilot was physically at the controls, the
> captain or first officer

That's not true [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2013/07/08/200086858/asi...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2013/07/08/200086858/asiana-crash-plane-was-34-knots-below-target-speed-
ntsb-says) We already know that the captain in training was flying. We also
already know that a cockpit with 4 experienced pilots let the airspeed fall
below vref for 30 seconds before doing anything.

Really good article!

------
chiph
Probably the best take-away is that the media is sensationalizing this,
primarily because there hasn't been a crash by a major airline in over 10
years.

~~~
pinaceae
AF447 crashed 2009 on its way from Rio to Paris. Co-Pilot error, wiped out all
228 onboard.

Armchair experts tallyho!

~~~
chaz
The article's statement is more qualified. "the first multiple-fatality crash
involving a major airline _in North America_ since November 2001"

~~~
smackfu
I feel like if you are following your "first" with that many qualifiers, it
starts losing meaning.

~~~
mikeash
The first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline in North America
with an airliner carrying over 100 passengers and at least five kosher meals,
not arriving on a Tuesday.

------
wslh
I saw another opinion on Philip Greenspun's blog: _My visual approach, and
Asiana’s_ [http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/07/07/my-visual-
appr...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/07/07/my-visual-approach-and-
asianas/)

He is an amateur pilot.

------
rz2k
Perhaps the most favorable indication of the culture of commercial air flight
is that the attitude exhibited by this author has been exceedingly rare.

First of all I haven't read or seen any speculation that wasn't qualified as
being mere speculation. Second, this is the first instance of reading someone
minimizing the accident _because_ of the excellent safety record.

Is it too obvious to say that the safety record comes from not minimizing
accidents as flukes? The rigorous/tedious checklists, innovations like
removing oxygen from near empty fuel tanks so they're less likely to explode,
and flight attendant training for quick exits come from experience and the
enormous amounts of attention directed at every past failure.

Such advances come from a combination of the expertise of people with domain
knowledge _and_ people outside of the domain having high standards. In 1985,
described as an example of a terrible year for air travel, one still could
have put the safety record in perspective with other hazards. Surely it was
far more dangerous to travel by car. It is easy to imagine pilots and
engineers of 1985 wishing that outsiders who knew less than them would just
shut up and let them do their jobs without unnecessary distractions. It's even
easy to imagine arguments about the meddling not only being costly, but even a
dangerous distraction.

Some hysteria, and definitely a lot of lawsuits, aided in the prioritization
of problems for people who had the expertise to come up with solutions to
minimize fatalities in the future. Outside, unwelcome pressure also disrupts
the status quo which, by definition, is part of every failure.

I imagine anyone who has domain specific expertise has at least at some time
been incredibly annoyed to have to deal with and attempt to manage the
reactions of nonexperts while they're in the midst of solving a problem
immediately at hand. And yet, such a reaction is cowardly, and enormously
unproductive in the long term.

I'm not sure if I am beating a dead horse over an obvious point, or not making
the point very well at all, but I think it is really important to avoid the
pitfalls of only talking to experts, or peers, or people within your
established hierarchy of influence when attempting to address failures. This
article, made me recall students of nuclear physics on Reddit talking about
Fukishima, who couldn't decide whether it was irrelevant because it was an
older reactor design, or whether it was irrelevant because it occurred after
an earthquake and tsunami that were more severe than the models forecast as
possible, or whether nuclear disasters in general are irrelevant because their
understanding of worst case was the not-that-bad-all-things-considered case of
what was only achieved through heroics of people at Chernobyl.

What made the point for me personally was reading about failures at NASA. I
highly recommend the long "Columbia's Last Flight" by William Langewiesche in
_The Atlantic_ [1] as it had a great influence on me when it came out in 2003,
and helped me learn to value input from people without specialty knowledge.
Even when special expertise defines who is most likely to develop fixes, the
big picture view sometimes only afforded to outsiders is important, or
sometimes just enough disruption so different voices within the system are
heard.

In the case of NASA, things were humming along for the entire edifice because
it had worked before when they squelched concerns by small groups within the
enormous operation. As a result, when it failed, it was the system itself that
failed, and it would have been reckless to trust that system to determine what
went wrong. Perhaps even more famously, with Challenger, Richard Feynman was
the gadfly in that investigation, and later had plenty to say about the
ability of entire cultures to encourage mistakes specifically as a result of
their desire to build in-group consensus.

So, I think the air travel industry deserves an enormous amount of respect for
its excellent safety record, and that the shortage of voices trying minimize
this failure suggests that they will accurately determine what went wrong. The
value of this column is as an example to the rest of us, not in the air flight
industry, of what not to do, and what attitudes stand in the way of
improvement and finding solutions.

[1]
[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbia...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbias-
last-flight/304204/?single_page=true)

~~~
waster
"Even when special expertise defines who is most likely to develop fixes, the
big picture view sometimes only afforded to outsiders is important, or
sometimes just enough disruption so different voices within the system are
heard."

Yes! This is not unlike having a child solve the problem of the 18-wheeler
stuck underneath a too-short overpass. Have outsiders review the data, the
situation, suggest possible causes and solutions. This extends to so many
venues, IMHO, beyond accidents like the Challenger/Feynman, Chernobyl,
Fukishima and Asiana Flight 214. Some of the most successful and impressive
businesspeople I have know are those that discuss their work with outsiders
openly, and _really listen_ to what the outsiders have to say.

~~~
adamcw
I'm not familiar with the 18-wheeler anecdote you mentioned. Could you provide
a link or details?

~~~
Danieru
I was curios about it too. Straight googling was fruitless but guessing at the
solution (Something within the common functionality of a truck and which would
be "obvious" in hindsight and thus work for a riddle.) The google string that
worked brought this up:
[http://rawksoup.com/neighborhood/pg/blog/read/1987/brain-
tea...](http://rawksoup.com/neighborhood/pg/blog/read/1987/brain-teaser-stuck-
truck)

------
furilo
the article hardly says anything... (more than dont believe what media
provides, which again is nothing new)

~~~
greghinch
So you would have preferred the pilot author make different uninformed,
speculative claims about the cause of the crash? That's the whole point: no
one reporting on or writing about this has all the facts yet

~~~
furilo
> no one reporting on or writing about this has all the facts yet

yep, that is implicit in the lack of an official and conclusive report. But I
have spent 10 minutes reading the article waiting for something interesting,
and he just says nothing apart from wait for the official info, dont
speculate. which is the default mindset of many. but yes, there might be a
whole lot of other people who needs to read this carefully ;)

------
jordanthoms
I'm finding it a little annoying how people seem to like to defend every
aspect of the flight - the pilots were fine, the plane was fine, the runway is
fine (two of those I believe, BTW), as if that makes it better. The plane
crashed and two people died, something was _definitely_ wrong.

------
stcredzero
The distinction between regional carriers and the majors made in the article
stinks. If one chooses lowest cost flights, it's impossible to not end up on a
regional carrier on one leg of your flight.

------
Aloisius
Can someone explain to me why humans land these planes?

These airports are fixed. We can easily set up transmitters around them to
allow the plane to triangulate its position to less than an inch. Even
excluding the tragedy of the loss of human life, you would think the lost of a
multi-billion dollar airplane even once every decade would push people to
automate the most dangerous part of flying (landing) to machines.

~~~
will_asouka
Autoland is often used (mandatory in very low visibility) but requires 2
humans to monitor in case of equipment failure. To develop autoland with
sufficient redundancies to require no monitoring, and install accompanying
ground equipment at every commercially used airfield is way more expensive
than training humans to land aircraft. Airframe loss is an insurable risk at
market price.

Presently, the numbers favour accepting human error.

~~~
splicer
I wonder how the failure rate for autoland compares to that of human-
controlled landings (specifically on the Boeing 777). I'm fine with having the
human as a backup, but if autoland on a particular plane has a lower failure
rate, I prefer to trust my life to autoland.

------
cpncrunch
Whatever happened on final approach into SFO, I highly suspect that it was in
fact related to the culture of Korean air safety in 2013:

[http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight-
cras...](http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/518568-asiana-flight-crash-san-
francisco-63.html#post7931852)

~~~
coin
More dribble and speculation

~~~
cpncrunch
Say what? This was a detailed and well-written post by a United check captain
who actually worked in Korea. Also the info has been confirmed by another
captain who worked there. I'd downvote you if this site would let me.

------
kailuowang
I can't believe I read this article on HN. People died due to some human error
(if it's not the weather it must be some human error somewhere) and the public
wants to know why. Media is serving that demand, it could be over-speculating
but it doesn't mean that a polit should feel obliged to start defending the
engineers on the expense of first categorizing it as a non-catastrophe and
then blame the passengers.

To me, listing all the past tragedies to make the point that this one doesn't
deserve the public attention is at the very least inconsiderate if not
offensive.

~~~
driverdan
As the article said, stop speculating. You don't know it was caused by human
error. Wait for the data to be analyzed.

~~~
rogerchucker
Yeah but he seems to take the liberty to speculate that passengers were being
selfish in lugging their carry-ons down the aisle while evacuating and
endangering others' lives. Unless anybody actually complained about this being
an issue in the evacuation process, he's not sticking to the facts either. So
please, let's stop with the "let's not speculate" garbage. Everybody will do
it. He's just trying to cover for his industry and the people in his
profession.

------
rogerchucker
Yeah, let's give the benefit of doubt to the pilots and only scold the
passengers. Typical apologist bullshit.

~~~
rogerchucker
I wish the coward downvoters would actually point out why I'm wrong with my
summarization of this article.

~~~
pavedwalden
Well, I haven't earned my downvote wings yet, but I'd wager you did yourself
in with "typical apologist bullshit". They're not silencing your opinion,
they're disapproving of your tone.

