[throwawaycan]

It’s always easy in those threads to see who’s familiar with the world of aviation and who’s not.

No it’s not comparable to a cop that confuses things in the heat of the moment. Not anywhere close to be relatable.

If it was, planes would be crashing down the sky quite often (and it would have been fixed for decades already).

[octo888]

WalterBright is not totally unfamiliar with the aviation world...:

> Bright is the son of the United States Air Force pilot Charles D. Bright

> Bright graduated from Caltech in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Aeronautical Engineering

> He worked for Boeing for 3 years on the development of the 757 stabilizer trim system

[nosianu]

So? The comparison still makes no sense. Those switches cannot be accidentally flipped, and they are in a place where the pilots' hands have no action to take at all during that period. That is very different from mixing up two similar weapons in a similar location.

Location of the switches: https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/c-gettyimag...

Here is a video of a takeoff and climb in a 787: https://youtu.be/TTZozTaWiRo

The pilots have no business with their hands in the area of those switches in that phase of the flight (9:30+ in the video). They don't even have to touch the throttle, and even if they did, that's a long way from where you touch the throttle down to the base where those switches are. Which you can't just flip either.

How is that even remotely similar to that cop's situation?

[WalterBright]

> Those switches cannot be accidentally flipped

Yes, unbelievable things can happen. There are crashes where the pilot got discombobulated and a crash resulted.

For another example, there are at least two crashes I recall (and I am sure there are many more) where the pilot pulled back to recover from a stall despite being trained endlessly to push forward to recover. (And they killed everyone on board.) Pilots get confused by what an alarm means, and do the wrong thing. Pilots assume the autopilot is on but they had accidentally turned it off. Sometimes people get crazy urges to do the wrong thing (there's a word for that: cacoethes).

These things are rare, but when there are millions of flights, rare things happen.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Interesting. "Cacoethes" means "malignant" in Greek. I didn't know the other meaning in English.

[WalterBright]

I cheated and looked up the word myself, and just had to use it!