Do you think you could leave the speculation about cause and fault to the authorities? People have died and you're confident enough to start attributing blame with essentially zero information? Appalling.
I don't see what the problem is with people speculating. He didn't claim to know what happened. He made clear he was uncertain what happened and offered a possible explanation without alleging to have some ability to know the truth.
Suggesting someone was possibly too fatigued to properly operate the aircraft is accusing someone of professional negligence at least, isn't it? Possibly criminal negligence?
I don't think it's too different from reading a story about a murder investigation and idling throwing out 'could be Bob that did it - I hear he gets angry sometimes' without knowing Bob, knowing whether he usually gets angry or not, whether or not he was angry or not at the time, or whether anyone was angry at all in the situation or even if Bob had anything to do with it in the slightest.
Granted, citations were needed for the post you're hammering. (I can't find anything online either way, re sleep loss in this accident.) But the author might not be speculating about the sleep loss, insiders sometimes comment here, in which case there won't be citations.
And this is why HN has the rules about "general news" it has.
Discussion of specific issues is interesting, but they're better discussed in extra threads instead of as speculations on a case nothing concrete is known about.
I haven't called anything "irrelevant". But without anything actually known, comments can basically only reiterate generic points about plane crashes or suggest random possible reasons, which predictably leads to discussions on how it's irresponsible to speculate or suggest specific (now dead) people misbehaved without evidence. It doesn't make for good content, and the fact alone that the crash happened isn't a good topic for HN.
This specific subthread starts with either speculation or unsourced claims of lack of sleep: That alone is an interesting topic of discussion, but better placed on a submission about a specific case where this is known to have been a factor, or some general article about it, not here.
My point is that we don't know whether the poster was speculating. I would be happy with a citations for all comments rule, but it's not in place now. The comment had details, wasn't general speculation.
There are pretty good rules around crew rest and sleep requirements. Too early to rule anything out, but it wouldn't be terribly high on my list as a sole factor. Generally aviation accidents require a multiple serious problems (which is great, because safety is very robust), but NTSB does a good job investigating.
Wow, I actually didn't know they were different. (I assumed scheduled air cargo would be the same rules as scheduled pax). I see Congress tried to harmonize back in 2012/2013 but it didn't happen. I guess it makes sense for things like the small FedEx 208 flights to be different from pax, but large jet aircraft should probably have similar regulations to passenger service, as the risk isn't only to the aircraft, but to those on the ground.
