To me, this seems entirely plausible, even if the movement is relatively slow. Do pilots have their lunch tray on their lap (between the stomach and the controls) when they eat? Maybe the pilot asked the flight attendant to move the seat back so that they could eat comfortably (as they obviously cannot reach that control themselves), and it was moved in the wrong direction accidentally?
Not commenting on this specific case, but it is possible for things held (or not) by pilots to affect the controls. An RAF Voyager (strategic lift aircraft based on the A330) dived 4000ft because the pilot was using a personal camera throughout the flight and it got stuck between his seat and the joystick, and his failure to admit it caused an accident investigation that temporarily grounded the entire fleet [0], [1].
> Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have demonstrated that an Apple iPad likely jammed against the co-pilot’s left pedal prior to the fatal crash of a Rotak Helicopter Services Chinook in Idaho last year.
It's also happened to me once that something was dropped and got wedged behind the rudder pedal, blocking its movement. Tiny GA aircraft and we noticed it during the start-up check (when you check the full range of the flight controls). The checklist did its job. But if it had dropped during flight it could have been really dangerous.
I can imagine it can happen even in more professional circles.
True, good point. But it's very very hard to do that on an aircraft because space is at a huge premium. You simply don't have infinite space around the pedals. Or other controls for that matter. For example a clipboard could fall on the center pedestal and flip one of the gazillion switches. Luckily most important ones have barriers around them, or other safeguards like the need to lift up the lever before moving it.
That switch almost seems to be made for being pressed accidentally - pretty big and seemingly easy to accidentally run into. I guess the big part behind the headrest is the mentioned cover and should be down with a pilot in the seat making the switch inaccessible? And I guess this button is required to get in and out of the seat and that is why they made it so big and easy to access?
EDIT: Better video [1], that switch is not easy to press, I completely misinterpreted the video.
What you're looking at in the video isn't actually the switch, it's the switch cover.
Behind the cover is a rocker switch that moves the seat, but it's not visible in this video.
It's extremely unlikely just "running into it" was the issue, but accidentally moving the seat in the wrong direction is somewhat plausible, especially if the cover is obscuring the switch.
Blancolirio, a YouTube Boeing pilot, said that yes, they ate with their food tray on their lap. He added, somewhat enviously it seemed to me, that Airbus pilots get a tray table due to their controls being off to the side.
I would guess that it might be necessary to move the empty seat forward to access things that would otherwise be blocked by the retracted seat. That also means you have to be able to get it back later and this might also be needed if you have to pull an incapacitated pilot out of his seat. There probably has to be another switch for the pilot to move the seat forward, it would seem quite cumbersome to use that one for getting into and out of the seat.
Maybe, I don't know what controls you'd want someone to be accessing without being in the seat. For retraction, definitely, but that sounds like a "pull this seat all the way back" switch would be better, rather than one that controls the precise position.
The seat probably uses the exact same mechanism for both the seat back switch and the operate when seated switch. This type of mechanism is probably also considered safer. A mechanism where you momentary push a button and then it "pulls back all the way" would probably warrant extra consideration for having something stuck in the rails or bumping into someone. I could see these two factors weighing into someone's decision to just use this design.
Blancolirio, a YouTube airline pilot, talked about this on his channel.
If you're the pilot trying to get into the seat, you'd normally have to reach for the regular seat controls which are farther forward and kind of awkward to reach from behind. But with this switch you can draw the seat all the way back so that you can climb into it easily.
I don’t know. It’s almost like people need to get paid for their work. The real question is why do you feel so entitled that you believe that you should get everything for free?
Here's the issue, if you wanted to read every interesting article posted to HN on a given week who would have to be subscribed to 15-20 different paid services... which I'm sure you'll agree is ridiculous.
Currently I subscribe to Disney+ and Amazon Prime only, because I was only using Netflix for maybe two hours per week and for me, that's not worth the price.
If I use the same logic for online magazines and newspapers, there is no online text content that I use for more than two hours per week and as such, the ridiculous subs prices make no sense to me. Also, it's highly likely I would end up subscribing to say NYT, and then that week all I really want to read is something on Forbes or Bloomberg and nothing on NYT, or a similar scenario. There is too much fragmentation and the value proposition just isn't there. It's like there were 15 different streaming services with content roughly divided between them.
Sure people need to make a living but the current model just doesn't work for me. Maybe if I was "rich" I would just pay for every text based publication out there, but I'm not, and paying for something I use so little makes no sense.
You know what the error message means, you've decided to use a non-fully-featured browser to visit their webpage. It's like taking the wheels off of your car and then complaining that your immobile vehicle isn't eligble for the drive-thru lane at a restaurant.
They have a print edition that you're welcome to buy from any local store that sells newspapers.
I'm sorry, I'll tell Mozilla that Firefox is non-fully-featured right away.
HN doesn't seem to mind it, I don't see why showing me a bunch of text is such an insurmountable technical challenge for a website.
Also, to continue the car analogy, it's more like turning your headlights off and the drive-through complains that your car is nonstandard and won't let you order.
Why would you tell Mozilla that? Their firefox browser works just fine with WSJ, both to display articles and to subscribe to their digital offerings.
As is nearly always the case: the user is at fault.
To fix the car analogy that you maliciously broke, it's like a car that you took the engine out of, and then complain that it doesn't drive. But if anyone asks why your car is broken, you weirdly pretend that you didn't take the engine out of it, and make asinine statements about how "it has wheels, why doesn't it roll" knowing full well why it doesn't.
I paid for that, I buy stuff all the time and companies are taking some of that money for their ad budgets and send it to websites so that they can use it to finance their content. It is nice of them that they are not only using my money to finance content I want to see but as an added bonus also want to make me happy with flashy ads, but I do not want to see those, so I block them.
I have subscribed to Japantimes, only to find out it uses a 3rd party integration - piano.io, I can’t access the content I’ve paid for without enabling 3rd party tracking. Worse the JWT token has my name and email address in it (base64).
Then realized that paying makes me more targeted. I can just buy a newspaper at any kiosk without a subscription and it doesn’t have cookies in it.
Because, frankly, most of this content is very cheap.
As in the value of these 'news' is zero and often negative.
These are not starving journalists trying to reveal the 'truth'.
These are big corporate entities peddling a lot of fast food content and the agenda of their shareholders/sponsors. The 'real' journalists (if such a thing still exists) who work there get paid peanuts compared to how much they squeeze from the millions of readers through these anti patterns.
Now that they built this huge ship, they have to keep producing content just to keep it afloat, regardless of whether there's any value in it for the readers. Most of the time there is none.
Important news will reach you without any paywalls.
I don't feel entitled, in fact I don't really care about TFA.
The link was posted to HN and then immediately someone commented with a archive link, because the original link is not working for most of the people here who never pay for news, because they know better.
But the WWW is now broken for everyone because of this.
Journalists don't need to eat though. They can be replaced by fully automated open source and free AI news agent self loops run by volunteer computation resources.
If they're going to exploit our attention and refused implement free and open source newsagents on their own, but instead extort us for subscriptions and steal our attention with unwanted ads, then we have no choice but to displace them with our own free and liberated solutions to the news problem.
I'm not okay with paying with news. If I have to pay with news by losing attention, it is far better to simply have no news.
Who the heck cares what Boeing did this or that if it requires guzzling a hot steamy load of ads or purchasing a subscription. I definitely don't want that.
This is part of why user operated independent and free and open source AI news agents are going to make things a lot better.
Interesting to see that the passenger in the video contradicts that explanation with his testimony of the pilot saying the instruments went blank for a few seconds.
I find the dark screen report persuasive because there's an air worthiness directive against that 787 which will cause the reset of flight control l computers. That would be consistent with both the dark screens story and the loss of control, if true.
Except that the expected loss of control would not have suddenly changed the direction of the plane, but instead kept the direction from being suddenly changed.
AFAIK, the primary objective of pilots when talking to passengers in situations like this is not to be 100% honest, but to avoid a panic. In this particular instance, he might also have tried to protect the flight attendant or avoid personal/company embarrassment. Although as a passenger, "I was accidentally pushed against the controls" would comfort me much, much more than "the controls of the entire aircraft suddenly went black and we have no idea why".
Guess the real reason may also provoke anger in some passengers. You can argue with attendants if you know that crew did it, you can't really argue with a plane or forces of nature. For those passengers providing fake reason would ensure a safe flight.
That the first port of call is to blame the people on board is completely expected. This one is interesting because the explanation is "our flagship aircraft has a kill-everyone-onboard switch on the pilot chair that someone pushed".
That's not totally reassuring from Boeing. I guess it adds to the accumulating reasons to never get on one of their aeroplanes.
It's a necessary switch in the right location and protected by a cover. Of all the controls on the flight deck, this is pretty low on my list of concerns. I bet nearly all similar large aircraft have something pretty much equivalent, given the obvious use case.
It’s probably quite far up the list for those who ended up smashing into the ceiling. Assuming this was the cause, it’s a problem, though maybe less so than other shite Boeing systems in play at the moment (eg, the de-ice situation).
I suppose opinion is divided on whether the pilot should be able to crash at will. There's a copilot involved partly on those grounds.
Somewhere there's a flow chart missing an exclusive or on adjusting the seat position and putting the plane into a dive. And another one that failed to put the control out of the way of people walking around.
