[TomatoCo]

To belabor the point and repeat a bit from Wikipedia, this was bar-none the absolute perfect flight crew possible. A flight crew with over 65000 hours experience and, riding as a passenger, a training pilot with a further 23000 who had specifically practiced this exact failure (total loss of hydraulics) after a lost craft four years prior.

For further reading, https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/fields-of-fortune-the-cr...

[0cf8612b2e1e]

This blurb from the wiki stood out to me

  Despite the fatalities, the accident is considered a good example of successful crew resource management. A majority of those aboard survived; experienced test pilots in simulators were unable to reproduce a survivable landing. It has been termed "The Impossible Landing" as it is considered one of the most impressive landings ever performed in the history of aviation.

[tivert]

> crew resource management

That doesn't mean what I'd assumed it would by mean just looking at the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management

[mncharity]

Engineering for failure management, for consistent performance of complex collaborative operations, through team organization, culture, and practices, is... nifty. Aviation, industrial engineering, medicine. An excellent obstetrics team can be breathtaking performance art. An antithesis of Dilbert organizational dysfunction. But wow is the transformation hard - a multi-decade, multi-generational slog. And many industries and professions are still in denial - "we don't have a problem, and anyway, we can't fix it". Decades of work ahead for them. For us.

[rpmisms]

Airlines have figured out that people suck at multitasking.

[jrockway]

Airlines are almost "lucky" in the sense that when they mess up training and processes, people die. As a result, they are somewhat motivated to fix it.

In other industries, we say "that didn't work, VCs, can I have another $2M" and are just told "yup, of course!" As a result, we learn slow.

Personally, I stole checklists from aviation and love it. I remember one week I was on vacation and we needed to do a complicated migration. I prepared a checklist for the migration, and someone other than me did it. There was no downtime. We used the same checklists for future migrations, and again, nothing forgotten, nothing missed. It may be obvious to say "landing checklist: gear down" but it's effective.

[rpmisms]

Checklists are amazing. Humans are really clever, but we're too good at context, and will completely miss steps, especially if the outcome of the previous step is unexpected.

[iancmceachern]

Plus one for checklists. Checklists are secret sauce

[nnurmanov]

We call them procedures, if you don’t have written step by step procedures with rollback steps, you are not supposed to do any production stuff

[ornornor]

What do you use to create, update, and recall your checklists?

[jrockway]

I used ... Google Docs.

[Sakos]

Other checklists? It's checklists all the way down

[pavel_lishin]

Reminds me of the Gimli Glider, and the incredible coincidence of having an experienced glider pilot as the Captain of that flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

[vic-traill]

>Reminds me of the Gimli Glider

This was a very Canadian accident, in that they ran out of fuel halfway through their cross-country flight because of (in the end) conversion errors in calculating the required fuel amount for the then-new metric 767. Canada was still in the conversion process from imperial to metric, and the airline industry was a relative latecomer to that change.

[charlie0]

I'm always surprised by stuff like this, don't airplanes have fuel gauges like cars do?

[jandrese]

It was more confusion. One system was broken, and the alternate was taken out of service. The pilot was then confused because flying with only one sensor was considered acceptable, but he was asking about a both sensors out situation instead. So they did it the old school way with dipsticks, but the conversion formula written on the sheet was wrong because they were in the process of switching. Also, the person who's job it is to get this right didn't exist on the 767 and Air Canada had not finished figuring out how to divvy up the duties when that seat wasn't filled. It's one of those Frogger failures, so many things have to line up just right at this one point in history for the problem to happen. Luckily in this case everyone came out ok.

[somat]

The fuel gauges were inoperative. Apparently this condition does not ground the plane, however the crew has to maintain awareness of the fuel level via alternate means. on the ground you put a stick in the tank and in flight you know how much fuel was loaded and you know much was burned(airplanes tend to have good fuel per hour meters). Only this time the amount of fuel requested was in gallons and the amount loaded was in liters.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

But absolute respect to the pilot for getting it down in one piece. I mean on one level he was just doing his job. but sometimes that is all it takes to be a hero, to do your job in the face of adversary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=686xoeQAVA4

[abofh]

You hear about the coincidences that work out, you're unlikely to hear about the pilot who was a professional glider who landed his regular flight at Dulles.

Thousands of planes in the air every day, that one with engine failure has a pilot who practices without engines isn't surprising. I'd be more surprised if he was a skilled mechanic who repaired the engine in situ.

[pavel_lishin]

> You hear about the coincidences that work out, you're unlikely to hear about the pilot who was a professional glider who landed his regular flight at Dulles.

But it's also amazing just how few fatal air crashes there are! I know that the FAA is pretty incredible at their job, but there just aren't that many incidents of planes going down and killing everyone on board - and out of those few bad incidents, having two where everything lined up perfectly feelsl weird!

[pfdietz]

This is illustrated by another thing discussed on the UA 232 wikipedia page.

There were some "lap children" on the flight, some of whom died in the crash. So it was proposed that all children be in their own seats on commercial flights. This regulation was in place for less than a decade before being revoked. The reason? Economists estimated that because this would raise the cost of a family flying, it would encourage some to drive instead of flying -- and for every 1 life saved by the regulation, it would cost 60 lives due to the much more dangerous driving.

[dghlsakjg]

I hear this story all the time, but would love to see a source. The FAA takes flight safety seriously, but one thing they famously don’t do is listen to outside expertise. Anyone vaguely familiar with their medical approval process can tell you that.

[pfdietz]

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/child_safety-Clau...

[k8svet]

Fascinating. Thanks so much for sharing this. Good read.

[noman-land]

Astonishing read. Thank you.