[HN Gopher] Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights
___________________________________________________________________
Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights
Author : Thevet
Score : 121 points
Date : 2025-06-04 20:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| WalterBright wrote:
| My dad was a B-17 navigator and later a career pilot. He told me
| that Earhart was a reckless pilot, and had little respect for
| her. Lest you think he was sexist, he professed admiration for
| Jacqueline Cochran.
| WalterBright wrote:
| An unmentioned aspect is airplanes of that era did not have
| hydraulically boosted controls. They were designed according to
| the strength of men. This means under emergency conditions,
| women were simply not strong enough.
|
| My dad flew B-17s, and with 3 engines out and just an outboard
| engine running, it took all of a man's strength to keep it
| straight. Usually, the pilot and copilot would trade off each
| 10 minutes.
|
| When planes got larger, like the B-29, boost had to be added.
|
| To accommodate female pilots, Boeing reduced the flight control
| forces in the 757.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Is there a ceiling to the amount of force exerted on a
| plane's control surfaces or does every human have a limited
| range of what situations they could wrestle a plane out of?
|
| I've got to imagine that put into a fast enough dive,
| _nobody's_ pulling up?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The "feel forces" exerted by the pilot are taken into
| account for the maximum ability to control the airplane.
|
| A Boeing airliner has a travel limiter on the control
| surfaces that is automatically adjusted based on the speed.
| Exceeding that travel puts enough torque on the airplane to
| literally tear the structure apart.
|
| There was an Airbus incident years ago where the pilot
| stamped on the rudder pedals to violently move the rudder
| full travel lock to lock, and it tore the rudder vertical
| stabilizer off.
|
| There are also situations where no amount of control input
| is going to wrest control back from an uncontrolled dive.
|
| In other words, designing the "feel forces" and travel has
| a large number of variables to it, and is not simple at all
| to get right.
|
| For a dive fast enough, you run into an effect called
| "separation". This is where the air flowing over the wing
| no longer converges at the trailing edge, but separates.
| This separation can engulf the elevators such that even at
| full travel, the elevators are operating in dead air and
| from then on, you're just along for the ride into a crash.
|
| This is a problem for many, many aircraft designs. You
| always gotta watch your airspeed.
|
| This happened to a 727 once, where the autopilot went
| berserk and sent the airplane in a dive so bad that
| separation happened. The quick thinking pilot decided to
| lower the landing gear in a desperate attempt to slow the
| airplane down. He succeeded, although the slipstream tore
| the doors off and bent the gear backwards, and saved
| everyone.
|
| It also happened to a 707, where the pilots weren't paying
| attention and the airplane slipped into a dive. By the
| pilots realized what had happened, they no longer had pitch
| control. One of them desperately began cranking the trim
| wheel by hand, and they managed to pull it up just before
| it hit the ocean.
|
| Yeager's X1 rocket aircraft had this problem, as did the
| F-86 jet fighter.
|
| For another fun anecdote, the F-80 Shooting Star had a
| problem in that its engine was too powerful. If you
| oversped the airplane, it would go unstable and pitch up,
| tearing the wings off. That meant the pilot always had to
| have one eye on the airspeed (yes, my dad was an F-80
| pilot, and flew them in combat). One day, a pilot had a Mig
| on his tail he couldn't shake. He thought, I'm dead anyway,
| let's see if I can pitch up and lose the Mig. So he
| firewalled the throttle, and sure enough the F-80 went
| through a violent maneuver and miraculously the wings
| stayed on and he shook the Mig off his tail. When he
| landed, the wings were bent up and the airplane was
| scrapped.
|
| Dive bombers used "dive brakes" to keep from overspeeding
| the airplane. My dad's favorite method for attacking an
| anti-aircraft gun emplacement was to dive straight down on
| it. AA gunners did not want to fire vertically (think about
| it). But it required my dad to have one eye on the target,
| one eye on the airspeed, and his third eye on the altitude.
| PNewling wrote:
| These are all incredible stories. I appreciate you
| sharing them with us.
|
| Could you link-to/tell-us more about the 727 affair? I've
| always had a fascination with autopilot (and autoland)
| systems, so I would love to read/hear more about this
| incident.
| WalterBright wrote:
| That's all I know about it. I was told the tale by my
| lead engineer at Boeing, Erwin Schweitzer. One of the
| great things about working with such engineers is all the
| amazing stories. You won't find much information on this
| incident or the "mach tuck" one because they didn't
| crash.
|
| But you might try googling "727 autopilot landing gear
| dive".
| WalterBright wrote:
| > These are all incredible stories.
|
| Thank you. I enjoy relating them. There are other
| airplane junkies who come to our monthly D Coffee Haus
| meeting, and we often wind up talking shop about airplane
| engineering.
| nayuki wrote:
| > This separation can engulf the elevators such that even
| at full travel, the elevators are operating in dead air
| and from then on
|
| Does this refer to the deep stall that affects T-tail
| aircraft ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stall_(fluid_dyn
| amics)#Deep_st... ), or is it a phenomenon that applies
| to nearly all fixed-wing subsonic aircraft?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Great question! I don't know the answer.
|
| The separation affects the ailerons as well, so you lose
| roll control.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Comparable physics, different route to the same effect.
| It has to do with air compression, speed of sound, etc,
| shielding the control surfaces and the shape of that
| effect around the plane as you increase speed. IDK if it
| has a name. Any youtube explanation of supersonic flight
| should cover it.
|
| Most higher speed subsonic aircraft recycle the design
| principals from supersonic aircraft to alleviate the
| problem. You could on paper dive a Learjet or 747 or
| other "designed for the higher end of subsonic" aircraft
| to Mach 2 and retain control authority if you wanted and
| if the airframe could take it.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| Mentour Pilot did a video on the second MCAS crash where
| they basically crashed due to being unable to pull up. MCAS
| changed the trim to a level where the pilots were pulling
| with a recorded 180 lbs pull weight but still couldn't hold
| the nose up
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcB31RgeL50 is the full
| video, well worth watching IMHO, but the talk about the
| fatal trim is at 51:00 to 53:00
| WalterBright wrote:
| The thumb switches would have pulled the nose up. But the
| pilots didn't read the instructions, and turned off the
| stab trim system with the airplane nose down. They also
| had the engines at full throttle, and the increased speed
| made it impossible to hand crank the stabilizer.
|
| The instructions were:
|
| 1. restore normal trim with the thumb switches
|
| 2. turn off the trim system
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Surely you know this, but MCAS was a badly designed
| system that failed in a fatal manner in the event of
| malfunctioning non-redundant sensor (10s of failure
| events per year). Boeing knew this, but allowed it kill
| everyone aboard two flights. Documentation in the
| instructions or not it had no business being on a
| commercial aircraft, ever.
| signatoremo wrote:
| It still exists today after modification that requires
| input from both AOA sensors.
|
| Why do you think it's badly designed? The implementation
| was badly done for sure.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Design and implementation are not completely distinct
| things, though. If e.g. a software company's backups were
| implemented solely as daily dumps to the same SSD the
| database was running on, and then they implemented a more
| sane backup solution after the practically-inevitable
| data loss, would we just go "well the _implementation_
| was badly done " or would people not call it out as bad
| systems design?
|
| Some designs are so poorly thought through (and/or
| conceived for the wrong reasons to begin with, like MCAS
| was) that they cannot help but yield poor
| implementations.
|
| (Also, input from one or two sensors was far from the
| only problem with MCAS' implementation. The fact that it
| could activate multiple times and that it could trim far
| harder and faster than human pilots could manually trim
| were equally contributors to making the saga a tragedy).
| WalterBright wrote:
| > conceived for the wrong reasons
|
| The reasons were correct. Making the MAX behave, as far
| as the pilots were concerned, like other models of the
| 737 makes the airplane safer. Many crashes have resulted
| from pilots getting confused about which airplane they
| are flying.
|
| The design particulars, however, were incorrect. That is
| Boeing's fault.
|
| > trim far harder and faster
|
| The 737 has only one electric trim rate - on and off. It
| does not trim harder or faster than the autopilot trim or
| the thumb switch trim. The signal all boils down to a
| wire that has signals "trim on / trim off". The thumb
| switches sit on the path of that wire, so when they
| activate they override the autopilot and MCAS. The cutoff
| switch is downstream of that.
|
| Part of the reason the manual trim wheel could not be
| moved is the airplane was overspeeding due to being
| (incorrectly) at full throttle. Overspeeding greatly
| increases the force on the stabilizer, making it much
| harder to move. In the EA flight, the overspeed warning
| horn could be heard on the voice recorder.
| anonymars wrote:
| Isn't the fact that it was _re_ designed (to not rely on
| a single AoA sensor, to only activate once per AoA-event,
| to limit the magnitude of intervention) a strong
| indication that it was badly designed?
| wat10000 wrote:
| It was implemented exactly as designed.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know this. I also know that there were 3 MCAS
| incidents. On the first one, the crew restored normal
| trim with the thumb switches, then turned off the stab
| trim system. They had no idea that MCAS existed, they
| simply followed standard procedure for runaway trim.
|
| After the first crash, Boeing sent around an Emergency
| Airworthiness Directive to all MAX pilots with the two
| steps I showed.
|
| There's no excuse for MAX pilots not reading,
| understanding, and remembering Emergency Airworthiness
| Directives.
|
| It's not just me. I've talked to two 737 pilots who said
| the same thing.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I see in a sibling comment that you do not think the MCAS
| system on the MAX was well designed, and the reliance on
| a single AoA sensor was not a good decision. I agree.
|
| The aircraft should have never been declared airworthy.
| There should have been no need for an EAD in the first
| place. There is no excuse for putting a control system
| that flies the craft into the ground when there is a
| failure in a nonredundant sensor on a commercial
| aircraft.
|
| The high standards required for pilots, like Amelia
| Earhart, do not obviate the even higher standards for
| quality and safety from manufacturers.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I suspect that Boeing didn't think it would be a problem
| because the runaway stab trim procedure is enough to stop
| it and recover. Who would have thought that trained
| pilots would not remember this procedure? It's supposed
| to be a "memory item", meaning consulting the checklist
| was not required.
|
| The stab trim cutoff switch is in a prominent position on
| the central console (not overhead or behind the crew).
|
| In the first Lion Air crash, the airplane dipped and
| recovered (via the thumb switches) 25 times over a period
| of 11 minutes. They never thought to turn off the stab
| trim system. It boggles the mind. Would you want to fly
| with a crew that didn't know what the switches on the
| console were for? Not me.
|
| Both Boeing and the crew are at fault. Some percentage
| also for whoever made the faulty sensor and the failure
| to see that it worked correctly after it was installed.
| genewitch wrote:
| Do we also blame the drivers of the Toyotas that got
| stuck accelerators, because any driver should know to
| take the car out of gear or turn the key to the off
| position. Right? While the car is accelerating at or near
| WOT?
|
| I've been in a car when the throttle got stuck open, we
| crashed, I hit the windshield. It happened in about 5
| seconds, and the driver spent most of those giving
| steering inputs to avoid hitting people and furiously
| working the break and kicking the gas pedal. It happened
| because enough engine mounts were broken or broke because
| of a hard throttle push.
|
| Also my dad died in a single seat plane crash because the
| engine died several times in flight, according to a
| witness interviewed by a local paper; there was no
| investigation at all so I'll never know what really
| happened. At least the company that made the plane
| changed their name!
| WalterBright wrote:
| I had the throttle stick on my car once. I immediately
| turned the ignition off. I was a teenager at the time
| (and my car was a POS).
|
| The brakes are much stronger than the engine (proof: you
| can brake in a much shorter distance than you can
| accelerate).
|
| On my current car, I have inadvertently hit the edge of
| the gas pedal while I stepped on the brake a couple
| times, as those pedals are too close together and I have
| wide feet. My reaction was to instantly move my foot.
|
| A number of those "surging" incidents are suspected of
| being the driver had their foot on the gas rather than
| the brake.
|
| Glad to hear you're all right after the crash. I nearly
| died in a car crash.
|
| Sorry to hear about your dad. It must be very frustrating
| to not know the cause. I thought all GA accidents were
| officially investigated.
| genewitch wrote:
| My car has a pushbutton "ignition switch" and i have not
| tried pushing it while travelling; however, my lexus also
| has floormat retention to stop the floormat from going
| onto the gas pedal. It wasn't "accidental" - there was a
| recall. The toyotas and lexus affected don't have a
| floating accelerator pedal, where it hangs from above and
| there's space underneath. The gas pedal is hinged _on the
| floor_ , and swings free at the top. So you could shove
| something forward and it will push the gas pedal down.
|
| If memory serves there was an instance in southern
| california where the driver called 911 or some other
| recorded line (they died); but it may have just been a
| witness statement i remember.
| quesera wrote:
| I do not work in aero or auto, but I have a much higher
| expectation of training and retention of a commercial
| airline pilot than I do of a random Toyota driver.
|
| I had a stuck accelerator on an old Ford F-150. The
| throttle inside the carb got stuck. I was lucky to have
| the Toyota case in my memory, so I just shifted into
| neutral.
|
| It was an automatic, which I think is another factor --
| the more direct control you remove from the driver, the
| less intuitive it becomes to compensate for a single
| system failure. Obviously a standard transmission driver
| would just hit the clutch.
|
| (And I've had a similar failure on an unfamiliar
| motorcycle that just came out of storage. Pulling the
| clutch bail was the instinctive response, after manually
| untwisting the throttle did not work. I learned my lesson
| about old vehicles eventually. Trust nothing, verify
| everything.)
|
| Very sorry to hear about your dad!
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| 1. The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System
| (MCAS) system existed because the plane was unstable at
| high angles of attack.
|
| 2. The 737 MAX was unstable because Boeing wanted to milk
| the 737 airframe further than it should have been for
| financial reasons and oversized engines were mounted
| forward on the wings.
|
| 3. Since the plane was unstable in this way, it would
| pitch up when climbing. MCAS would detect this through
| the angle of attack (AoA sensors) and automatically
| engage, forcing the nose down.
|
| 4. When the single, nonredundant AoA sensor failed, MCAS
| would misinterpret this and try to continuously force the
| nose down in normal operations. Or more plainly, it would
| fly the plane into the ground for no reason.
|
| 5. This happened at least 3 times. In two cases, it
| caused crashes, killing everyone - almost 350 men, women,
| and children - aboard.
|
| 6. Boeing strenuously blamed the crew in the first crash,
| and did not ground the planes.
|
| 7. Boeing did not ground the 737 MAXes after the second
| crash, either. The FAA only grounded the aircraft after
| much of the rest of the world already had.
|
| As you noted previously, MCAS existed to make the 737 MAX
| fly like prior versions of the plane. Boeing, in fact,
| lobbied for this outcome so it would not affect
| certification or require separate pilot training, which
| would have cost time and money. So while MCAS was
| documented, pilots were not required to be trained on the
| system, because of Boeings efforts.
|
| One cannot put a "don't crash the plane button" on a
| plane, even if it is well documented. It is particularly
| disgraceful if the "don't crash the plane" button only
| exists because the plane's manufacturer added the button
| to increase their own profits.
|
| I have to admit, you have made me lose my composure here
| a bit. I thought anyone this knowledgable about flying
| would not blame pilot error in the 737 MAX crashes. The
| plane was grounded for almost 2 years, this was arguably
| the greatest scandal in the production and regulation of
| commercial aircraft in history. Boeing paid $20 billion
| in fines and restitution, and pled guilty to criminal
| charges.
|
| For the benefit of anyone else curious about this, good
| starting points are
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings
|
| _" hours after the approval for MCAS's redesign was
| granted, Boeing sought, and the FAA approved, the removal
| of references to MCAS from Boeing's flight crew
| operations manual (FCOM)"_
|
| _" Boeing wanted the FAA to certify the airplane as
| another version of the long-established 737; this would
| limit the need for additional training of pilots, a major
| cost saving for airline customers. During flight tests,
| however, Boeing discovered that the position and larger
| size of the engines tended to push up the airplane nose
| during certain maneuvers. To counter that tendency and
| ensure fleet commonality with the 737 family, Boeing
| added MCAS so the MAX would handle similar to earlier 737
| versions."_
|
| _" The MAX was exempted from certain newer safety
| requirements, saving Boeing billions of dollars in
| development costs."_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_grou
| ndi...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-Tragedy-Fall-
| Boeing/dp/0...
| WalterBright wrote:
| All the media reports about the MAX cannot be trusted.
| All the ones I've seen contained false information.
|
| The first error was the claim that the MAX was
| "unstable". It just behaved differently due to the engine
| placement. I see this error all the time. And so on.
|
| The errors in the MCAS design were not to save money.
| They were just sloppy engineering. There was nothing
| wrong with the MCAS concept. The proof is MCAS is still
| there, it just had its flaws corrected.
|
| As for knowledgeable, I've talked with two 737 pilots.
| One told me it was pilot error and never would have
| happened to him. The other told me that his pilot buddies
| agreed with me but were afraid to speak up against the
| tidal wave of bad press. I also spent 3 years working on
| the 757 stab trim system, at one point I knew more about
| it than about anyone else. The 737 system is more
| primitive, but is easily understandable. (The 757 uses
| dual hydraulic motors driving a differential gearbox, the
| 737 has a single electric motor with manual drive for the
| backup. Both have a console mounted cutoff switch. Both
| have column thumb switches.)
|
| > Boeing added MCAS so the MAX would handle similar to
| earlier 737 versions.
|
| Which improves safety. This is never mentioned. (The 757
| and 767, very different airplanes, were designed to fly
| similarly and have the same cockpits. It did save money
| on training because of that, saved money on production,
| and improved safety.)
| filleduchaos wrote:
| > But the pilots didn't read the instructions
|
| Actually watching the linked video (or barring that,
| actually reading the final report) would dispense with
| this widely spread inaccuracy in fairly short order and
| make it quite obvious why they turned ON the stab trim
| system, which is what ultimately killed them.
|
| But of course, "the pilots were simply stupid" is a
| psychologically easier conclusion to walk away with.
| WalterBright wrote:
| As I wrote, the column switches override MCAS. It's also
| how the crew in the first MCAS incident recovered and
| continued the flight and landed safely.
| jajko wrote:
| Didn't investigation confirmed they followed official
| Boeing training?
| consumer451 wrote:
| One of the airlines that suffered an MCAS crash had asked
| Boeing for specific training on MAX and was denied, as it
| would have set a bad precedent for sales.
| kashunstva wrote:
| > the column switches override MCAS.
|
| Temporarily, right? Using the pitch trim switches on the
| yoke suppresses MCAS, but in order to remain at even net
| zero stabilizer position change, the duration of trim
| input would have to be of equivalent duration to the
| reciprocal MCAS-driven change. This is part of what made
| the problem so insidious - running trim for that long is
| rarely needed and rarely done. I haven't flown the MAX
| but I can't think of any type I have flown in which
| continual pitch trim input of 5+ seconds at a time would
| be required in flight.
| cameldrv wrote:
| This is not true. In the condition of a failed AoA vane
| like on the two accident flights, there is no way to
| enable the trim thumb switches and disable MCAS. You
| either get no electric trim and no MCAS or you get both.
| If you happened to have known that MCAS pushes the trim
| down for 9.3 seconds and then pauses for 5 seconds, you
| might have been able to time it and turn on the electric
| stab trim at just the right time when MCAS wasn't trying
| to kill you, but unfortunately the very existence of MCAS
| was hidden from pilots.
|
| If you flip the stab trim cutout switches, you can turn
| the wheel manually, but if there have already been a
| couple of cycles of MCAS, the plane may be so out of trim
| that you need too much force to move the trim wheel
| manually.
|
| In that case there is one thing that could save you which
| would be to do the so called rollercoaster procedure,
| where you push the yoke forward to unload the trim and
| then crank the trim up while you hurtle towards the
| ground. This was a documented procedure in the 737-300
| manual, but was later deleted.
|
| The real crime was that Boeing deliberately removed all
| mention of MCAS from the flight manual. The problem was
| that if there were procedures that pilots needed to know
| in order to recover from an MCAS failure, they would have
| been required to practice these procedures in a
| simulator, and Boeing's contract with Southwest had
| financial incentives if the MAX didn't require any
| additional sim time for pilots to transition from the NG
| to the MAX.
|
| We know that the information about MCAS was deleted from
| the manual because the only occurrence of the term MCAS
| in the MAX flight manual is in the glossary where it is a
| defined term. The tech writers obviously put it in there
| because it was described in an earlier version of the
| manual, but later deleted, but the glossary entry wasn't
| deleted when the description was.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The electric trim switches override MCAS (and indeed the
| crew of ET302 _almost_ saved the aircraft by turning it
| back on and commanding aircraft-nose-down (AND) with the
| electric trim).
|
| What is inexplicable is that they stopped doing that
| while leaving the trim system enabled _after_ correctly
| disabling it via the memory item checklist.
|
| Boeing's not blameless here, nor should the crew of ET302
| bear the primary fault, but they seem to have understood
| the issue (and it's not possible they didn't know about
| MCAS) and were frustratingly close to saving the flight.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > there is no way to enable the trim thumb switches and
| disable MCAS
|
| This is simply wrong.
|
| The electric trim switches override MCAS regardless of
| whether MCAS is trying to drive the trim or not. Timing
| it for when the MCAS was not engaged is completely
| unnecessary.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The problem is they don't know MCAS exists so it looks
| like the trim system has failed and is running away so
| the normal and natural solution is to disable electronic
| trim.
|
| Had they known about MCAS they could have potentially
| known they could override it then disbale the trim system
| but that information was hidden by Boeing so they didn't
| do it..
| cornholio wrote:
| This is an insane take. The plane was fitted with an
| undocumented automatic system that would erroneously
| change the pitch about ten times faster than what the
| pilot switches allowed, and that would automatically re-
| engage repeteadly as soon as the pilot released their
| switch, negating all progress made by the pilot. It would
| continue this adjustment blindly despite copious
| information available to the flight computers that a
| crash with terrain is imminent and that the pilot is
| having trouble leveling the plane.
|
| So the electronic control route was fried, any normal
| person in that situation and physical and mental overload
| would conclude that trim controls are not functional.
|
| The manual route, which they tried, involved at that
| speed an undocumented "roller coaster maneuver", pitching
| _forward_ (!!) to release pressure on the trim mechanism
| and allow manual adjustment. It goes without question it
| 's impossible the pilots could have come up with that
| solution in the mere seconds they had at their disposal,
| let alone the high risk it entailed.
|
| Reducing the throttle early would have saved the plane,
| but it would have also resulted in immediate pitch down
| due to the torque the engines create against the body of
| the plane, as they are mounted off axis. The autothrottle
| was left to near 95% for the entire ~250s duration of the
| flight (the setting necessary for take off at the
| particular altitude of the airport) and once the
| cascading failures consumed all their situational
| awareness it stands to reason why they failed to adjust
| it and then hesitated to perform an action that would
| have (in the short run) worsened the problem in a near
| crash situation.
|
| The MCAS as designed was a ticking timebomb that killed
| two plane loads of people in mere months, and Boeing
| accepted full responsibility for that, even if they are
| still denying criminal charges.
| coredog64 wrote:
| The 737 has had the issue of runaway trim forever. The
| giant "wagon wheels" used for trimming early models were
| very loud when activated, and part of that was to give
| the pilots a heads up that something unexpected was
| happening.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > about ten times faster than what the pilot switches
| allowed
|
| This is utterly false. The trim rate has two speeds - on
| and off.
|
| > would automatically re-engage repeteadly
|
| This is called "runaway trim". The procedure to counter
| it is to turn it off. The same procedure for every
| airplane.
|
| > any normal person
|
| Pilots are required to read and understand and remember
| Emergency Airworthiness Directives.
|
| Don't forget the first MCAS incident, where normal trim
| was restored with the column trim switches and then the
| trim was turned off and the airplane landed safely.
|
| Or the second where normal trim was restored 25 times,
| but never turned off.
|
| I would expect a MAX pilot to have paid attention to that
| crash, and the followup EAD which instructs them to
| restore normal trim with the column switches and then
| turn it off.
| cornholio wrote:
| > This is utterly false. The trim rate has two speeds -
| on and off.
|
| This is wrong and easy to disprove. The trim rate for a
| pilot issued trim command starts at 0.4 degrees/second at
| low air speeds and tappers off to zero as the speed
| increased towards Mach 0.68. The MCAS had a fixed rate of
| 0.27 degree/second that did not depend on airspeed. Here
| is the relevant quote from the FAA report on the 737MAX:
|
| > "If activated by a high AOA, MCAS moves the horizontal
| stabilizer at a rate of 0.27 degrees per second, which is
| the same trim rate as Speed Trim with flaps down. _The
| magnitude of the MCAS command is a function of Mach and
| angle of attack._ At higher airspeeds, flight-control
| surfaces are more effective than at lower airspeeds.
| Therefore, a smaller MCAS command at higher airspeeds has
| the same effect as a larger MCAS command at lower speeds.
| "
|
| So the trim rate is fixed but the magnitude (duration) of
| the original MCAS is variable to account for airspeed.
| Because the MCAS reengaged repeatedly due to erroneous
| AOA sensor data and faulty design logic, the duration
| became irrelevant. However, as the plane speed exceeded
| 0.6 Mach, the rate of pilot trim substantially decreased,
| meaning that a full 10s second activation of the MCAS
| could no longer be negated by a 10s trim command from the
| pilot. The flight recorder shows trim commands of up to 4
| seconds, which in fact allowed the MCAS to re-engage and
| issue a fresh 10s opposite command, at a higher rate.
| This is a disastrous succession of events that can't be
| blamed on the pilot.
|
| I won't go down the rabbit hole with the rest of your
| comment, enough to say you need to better vet your
| sources and reevaluate your claims. The Ethiopian
| Airlines pilots fought for their lives for a few
| desperate minutes and lost, quite possibly made some
| mistakes but overall many other qualified pilots would
| have failed too in the same scenario.
| glitchc wrote:
| Not being trained on distinct and aberrant behaviour of a
| specific aircraft is not the same as ignorant or stupid.
| WalterBright wrote:
| All MAX pilots received an Emergency Airworthiness
| Directive with the instructions on how to recover.
| arunabha wrote:
| If what you are saying is true, and it was the pilots
| fault, I'm wondering why did a corporation with the clout
| and resources of Boeing lose in court?
| rtkwe wrote:
| The wrinkle is that yes they could have saved the plane
| if they had information they didn't have because of
| Boeing's self serving negligence.
| snozolli wrote:
| For others reading through these interesting comments,
| here's a Wikipedia excerpt:
|
| _The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System
| (MCAS) is a flight control law built into the Boeing 737
| MAX 's flight control computer, designed to help the
| aircraft emulate the handling characteristics of the
| earlier Boeing 737 Next Generation._
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Reminds me of driving a car with manual steering. If you have
| never tried it, it is a _whole_ different experience and a
| massive workout.
| vunderba wrote:
| Totally agree. My first car as a teenager lacked power
| steering (and coincidentally the AC did not work). No power
| steering isn't so bad when you're in transit but the slower
| you go, the worse it gets.
|
| Summers spent parallel parking that pig left me pouring
| sweat.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Power steering and power brakes were added to accommodate
| female drivers. Disk brakes also need more pedal pressure
| than drum brakes.
|
| Steering wheels for manual steering tend to be larger,
| giving more leverage, and the steering gearbox is geared
| differently.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Disk brakes also need more pedal pressure than drum
| brakes.
|
| I had disk brakes on my '67 Firebird. Not only was the
| pedal pressure much higher, but you better have your
| crash helmet on when it snowed!
| RankingMember wrote:
| > Power steering and power brakes were added to
| accommodate female drivers.
|
| This is a myth. Power steering and power brakes were
| developed to make driving easier and safer for all
| drivers as vehicles became larger and heavier. Some of
| the advertising from the era framed the features as
| helpful to female drivers, but this was just that-
| advertising.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm not so sure that was a myth. My dad drove long before
| power brakes. Women often had trouble executing a hard
| stop due to the pedal force required, along with the
| primitive brakes. He said the term "women drivers" came
| about because of the difficulty they had muscling the
| controls in emergency conditions. (Power steering, too.)
|
| They also wanted to sell cars to little old ladies.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| After harbouring the idea for quite some time (mostly out
| of fear/FOMO of never learning to drive a manual) I finally
| gave it up and I will be buying an AMT car (even though the
| lessons I took were in manuals which are still very
| mainstream in my country and AMTs are catching up). I
| realised life is too small to put your wrists, elbows,
| knees, ankles, and shoulders (did I miss anything?) through
| this torture esp. in a traffic hell like my city.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Manual steering (no hydraulic boost)
| alnwlsn wrote:
| One time, I was driving across New Mexico, and we heard
| something break under the hood. No point in stopping to see
| what it was; we might as well drive it as far as we can
| until it stops. All was fine, going along the same
| perfectly straight section of highway for around 2 hours,
| until we made it to the next city and went to turn down a
| street - oof! It was then _very_ apparent the power
| steering pump went out.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| The serpentine belt in my wife's F250 Super Duty snapped
| one day. How she made it home and parked that beast
| without power steering I'll never know. At least it
| happened close to home!
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| > This means under emergency conditions, women were simply
| not strong enough.
|
| I challenge you to consider that men and women's strength
| have overlapping distributions.
| ses1984 wrote:
| IIRC the distribution doesn't actually overlap all that
| much.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Specifically you need to be in the top 10% for female
| grip strength to be stronger than the bottom 5% of male
| grip strength.
| dahart wrote:
| That's a subjective statement. Here's a picture, and I'd
| say there's a decent amount of overlap.
| https://briefedbydata.substack.com/p/female-vs-male-grip-
| str...
| ses1984 wrote:
| >In fact, just 17 of the 2,515 females, or less than
| 0.1%, have a summed grip strength greater than the median
| summed grip strength of males.
|
| You're right, it's subjective, but that's not what I
| would call a decent overlap.
| dahart wrote:
| You're not quoting the overlap, you're quoting the (IMO)
| misleading framing that compares extremes. If you look at
| the picture, roughly one third of the distribution has
| overlap. It's not a majority, but it's certainly not
| negligible either.
|
| BTW, the 0.1% number may be sampling noise, as similar
| studies have come up with numbers like 1% or 3%. While
| they're all small, 3% is 30x larger than 0.1%. Don't put
| a lot of stock in that number; it's trying to draw
| conclusions from the noisiest lowest-data part of the
| distribution, and therefore is highly prone to error.
| fawley wrote:
| > I challenge you to consider that men and women's strength
| have overlapping distributions.
|
| This is true. However, most pilots in the early days came
| from the military, which likely selects towards the
| stronger end of the men's distributions.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There is overlap, but not a whole lot with the same
| amount of physical training.
|
| In the military, they have standards for fitness.
| myrmidon wrote:
| To put some numbers here: Upper body strength and grip
| strength are around 3 standard deviations apart for men vs
| women, meaning that an average man is stronger than 99/100
| women.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| And women need to be in the top 10% of female grip
| strength to have stronger grip strength than the bottom
| 5% of men.
| dahart wrote:
| Those numbers might be true, but talking about standard
| deviations seems difficult to visualize or reason about,
| because knowing the width of the distribution is
| required, and because the width of the distribution of
| one sex doesn't reflect on the other sex, so the standard
| deviation framing is potentially misleading. Almost all
| sources talk about the ratio of mean strength of males vs
| females, and depending on the study and the specific
| exercise in question, the conclusion is typically
| somewhere in the neighborhood of 2/3, plus or minus
| 10%-15%. Saying women have 65% of men's strength sounds
| very different and sends a different impression from
| saying average man is stronger than 99% of women, even
| though both statements can be true at the same time.
|
| Importantly, those stats you brought up are limited to
| upper body. When it comes to lower body, the ratio of
| female strength to male is more like 80% and your stddev
| number is smaller, so at the very least your conclusion
| should preserve that qualifier: average man's grip or
| upper body strength is higher than 99% of women's grip or
| upper body strength. It's not quite true to generalize to
| an across-the board statement that avg man is stronger
| than 99% of women. It appears most studies widely agree
| the discrepancy is due primarily and simply to body
| weight / muscle mass; this is all mostly a simple
| byproduct of women being smaller than men on average.
|
| Googling I see some results on grip strength (GS) saying
| mean male GS is higher than 97% of females. The
| graph/study in this article happens to have an even
| smaller ratio than what you mentioned with male GS at
| higher than 99.9% of females. But look at the rather
| large overlap of the distributions (first image). Saying
| the average male is strong than either 97% or 99% or
| 99.9% of women one might not realize that each
| distribution overlaps with something like 30% of the
| area. (@bqmjjx0kac is correct - the distributions do
| overlap) https://briefedbydata.substack.com/p/female-vs-
| male-grip-str...
| 542354234235 wrote:
| >It appears most studies widely agree the discrepancy is
| due primarily and simply to body weight / muscle mass;
| this is all mostly a simple byproduct of women being
| smaller than men on average.
|
| But muscle is closely tied to testosterone, something men
| have much more of. It makes me think of the iconic study
| [1] where men were compared with/without testosterone
| injections, and with/without exercise. The men given
| testosterone that did nothing grew more muscle mass than
| men strength training in the gym. So it isn't women being
| smaller, it is that most men build more muscle laying on
| the couch than women going to the gym.
|
| [1]
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101
| dahart wrote:
| Yes, testosterone and other parts of male physiology are
| what lead to men having more muscle mass on average. Men
| and women have different average sizes, so we don't need
| to debate whether men are larger or women are smaller,
| both are true. The main takeaway from the muscle mass
| point for me is just that there's very little difference
| in strength between men and women per kilo, when
| normalizing against lean body mass. It's just a good
| thing to keep in mind when taking about these sex
| differences, since there's a lot of misleading framing
| and wrong impressions, right?
| myrmidon wrote:
| You are absolutely correct, and framing makes a huge
| difference on how such statements are perceived ("women
| are 65% the strength of men" vs "men are 50% stronger" vs
| "1 in hundred women stronger than average man").
|
| But pointing out that there is a 30% area overlap glosses
| over the main point in this context in my opinion: If you
| are going to have _any_ benchmark ( "need to be this
| strong to safely pilot"), then that benchmark is either
| going to be _trivial_ for most men or it 's going to be
| almost impossible to meet for almost every woman.
|
| I put this number here because it was quite surprising to
| me when I learned about this; naively, I would have
| expected something like 1/10 women to be stronger than an
| average man, but that is off by _a lot_.
| dahart wrote:
| > If you are going to have any benchmark
|
| This is actually why IMO saying women are 65% as strong
| as the average man is the better framing. It gives you an
| immediate, practical, and tangible goal. If the force
| required to do a given operation is acceptable for men
| and not acceptable for women, then we don't need to
| reduce the force by 100x, we need to reduce it by 1.5x,
| which is not very much.
|
| Talking about the standard deviation doesn't give you a
| usable result, while talking about the ratio of means
| does.
|
| BTW this argument _should_ be moot. It's very, very poor
| safety design to suggest that controlling a vehicle or
| doing anything else safety critical should require more
| than 50% of my maximum strength. My own strength varies
| considerably based on how much I have to use it. I can't
| maintain my max strength if I have to do it repeatedly,
| and it will affect my ability to think if I have to use
| my max strength in a crisis situation. There simply
| should not be controls that require more force than most
| women can apply, not even close.
| glowiefedposter wrote:
| Earhart was a dude.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| I challenge you to consider that the overlap is small
| enough to be ignored
| rpmisms wrote:
| Cochran was simply insane. I credit her success to a
| pathological lack of fear, and an amazing teacher in Chuck
| Yeager.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Was Neil Armstrong insane, too? He later remarked that he
| figured his odds of surviving were 50-50. I think he was
| being optimistic.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Many Great people are batshit. Chuck Yeager certainly was.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yup. I read Yeager's autobiography. A life very well
| lived.
| caycep wrote:
| These people basically have no amygdala
| WalterBright wrote:
| During the moon landing, when Neil took over the descent
| from the failed computer, Aldrin's heart rate went
| through the roof. Armstrong's remained steady.
|
| NASA picked exactly the right man for the job.
| richwater wrote:
| It's not really fair comparison. Being the actor is very
| different than being an observer.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Landing the LEM required the full active cooperation of
| both.
| ivanech wrote:
| Amrstrong's heart rate spiked to >150bpm during the moon
| landing, more than double his resting heart rate
| WalterBright wrote:
| I read otherwise. So I'm conflicted.
| caycep wrote:
| also, I imaging operational and safety planning/operations
| research basically didn't exist back then, or maybe was at a
| fledgeling state?
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| > He told me that Earhart was a reckless pilot
|
| I was surprised to learn the same once I started diving into
| her history. She definitely was a media phenomenon, with her
| public image largely manufactured by her publicist husband.
|
| Her story actually feels very similar to the fake YouTube
| personalities of today. What's funny is that, for all the
| complaints about people today being too gullible about modern
| influencers, the ones from history often succeed in fooling far
| more people.
|
| > Lest you think he was sexist, he professed admiration for
| Jacqueline Cochran.
|
| It's understandable why this needs to be said - unfortunately,
| these accusations accusations are the default reaction many
| people have to this criticism (I've seen them before in
| discussions about Earhart and others). Once someone is given a
| status of an icon for a particularly identity, people have an
| unpleasant habit of believing criticism of the icon is
| criticism of the identity. It would be nice if we were able to
| judge people as individuals.
| genewitch wrote:
| To your last point, I really enjoy trapped in the closet,
| both the video and the audio; but mentioning that got me a
| lot of grief, "don't you have kids? Don't you know about
| him?"
|
| Yeah a large portion of humans have flaws, do bad things (3
| felonies a day!), etc. But I think art (as it were)
| transcends the artist, especially in audiovisual stuff where
| it's much more likely there are other people involved that
| actually make the art memorable; however even a self-
| published asshole can produce something great.
|
| I guess I could just suffer the weird al trapped in the
| drive-through, to placate such people, or can ignore them. R
| Kelly got no money from me, anyhow, I bought it all
| secondhand. My conscience is clear enough, I think.
| WalterBright wrote:
| When JFKjr's crash was in the news, I phoned him up and asked
| what he thought the cause was.
|
| He didn't hesitate: "Spacial disorientation"
|
| Aka pilot incompetence. Airplanes don't care if you're a
| celebrity or not.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| That's a little too dismissive. Flying in those conditions is
| deeply disorienting, and you have to have instrument training
| (and discipline) to safely accomplish it. My dad (also air
| force pilot, F-104, and later, bush pilot) was flying near
| Block Island at the same time, and despite his training and
| experience said it was difficult and disorienting. You need
| to be rated for instruments and have developed trust in them,
| despite your senses.
| WalterBright wrote:
| JFK jr knowingly flew into haze without proper training. He
| had incidental instrument flying instruction, but was not
| rated for it. He was late and suffered from get-there-itis,
| a common killer of pilots.
|
| My dad worked for a while as an instrument flying
| instructor. He said the big hurdle was to learn to trust
| the instruments and ignore your body screaming at you that
| the instruments are lying.
|
| Your dad is exactly correct.
|
| He flew F-104s? I'm so jealous! As a teen, I lived near
| Luke AFB. I had a military ID, and would bicycle onto the
| base and head to the flight line. Luke was training
| Luftwaffe pilots at the time to fly F-104s. They'd start
| down the runway, and halfway down would light the
| afterburners. Boom! Followed by a gigantic flame shooting
| out the back. They'd take off at a steep angle with the
| most delightful thunder.
|
| I was so sorry to have to turn in my ID when I turned 21.
|
| I wanted to be an AF pilot, but the recruiting officer
| reluctantly said I could never be a pilot because of my
| glasses. And so I went into writing compiler :-/
| bombcar wrote:
| Anyone who's interested can go down to the local small
| airfield and ask an instructor to show you "unusual
| attitudes" - he'll have you sit in the seat with your
| head looking down, do things and then ask you what the
| plane is doing - then you look up and realize it's doing
| the exact opposite.
|
| At night with no visible horizon - you do it to yourself.
| WalterBright wrote:
| That's exactly how instrument training is done. The
| student wears a hood so he can only see the instruments.
| The instructor puts the airplane in various situations
| where your senses lie, and the student has to recover.
|
| My dad, against orders, carried a piece of pipe with him,
| to ensure the student would not panic and kill them both.
| He said he never had to use it.
| wombatpm wrote:
| I assume the pipe was to club the student pilot
| unconscious in order to recover control of the aircraft.
| WalterBright wrote:
| yup, thereby saving both of their lives.
| genewitch wrote:
| I really was hoping to make a lead pipe cryptanalysis
| rhyming reference but neither I nor Gemini can make it
| work, and I don't want to go get my thesaurus and rhyming
| dictionary to work something out.
|
| Lead pipe crash avoidance closest I could get.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Lead pipe for student paralysis.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It wasn't lead. Steel.
| genewitch wrote:
| I had paralysis as an option but, imo, a good rhyme would
| have the same cadence, and adding the "for" or "with"
| messes up the cadence. "no place like home for the
| holidays" -> "no plate like chrome for the hollandaise".
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _He said the big hurdle was to learn to trust the
| instruments and ignore your body screaming at you that
| the instruments are lying._
|
| In about 1967, my dad (career USAF, fighter jock) was
| flying in clear, sunny weather. He started to get bad
| vertigo, so he did an emergency, instruments-only landing
| at a nearby AF base. He said that on final approach, he
| "knew" he was upside down, and that it was all he could
| do to refrain from rolling the airplane "right side up"
| for touchdown on the runway.
| wat10000 wrote:
| A superior pilot uses their superior judgment to avoid
| needing their superior skills.
|
| Getting disoriented in those conditions is expected.
| Knowingly flying into those conditions without an
| instrument rating is very bad judgment.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > When JFKjr's crash was in the news, I phoned him up and
| asked what he thought the cause was.
|
| Um, what?!? .... ohhhh, you phoned _your dad_.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My dad flew in two wars, bombers and fighters and
| transports, propeller and jet, for 23 years. He also was an
| instructor for instrument training, and was given the job
| of accident investigation for a while. He ran base
| operations at Galena AFB in the Vietnam war. He owned
| thousands of books on aviation, wrote two books about it,
| and wrote articles for aviation magazines and books.
|
| Why wouldn't I ask his opinion?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| He, like me, was confused for a second and thought that
| you called JFK Jr after the crash.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| It's dumb that a man should be automatically assumed as sexist
| because he happened to elaborate a criticism of something a
| woman did in some context. I've even seen some women use this
| implicit assumption as a weapon, labeling as sexist a
| completely valid complaint.
| ergsef wrote:
| You're making it very black-and-white when there's a lot of
| nuance to these kinds of discussions. A woman in a leadership
| role making difficult choices or shutting people down may be
| abrasive, but a man doing it might be admired for their
| vision. A woman taking risks might be careless, or a
| dilettante, while a man taking the same risks is bold and
| courageous. Even if the outcome is the same, men can fail
| while women have to be successful (and even then they're
| still criticized for _how_ they succeeded).
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| It's very dumb. It's also the default assumption today in
| government, media, academia, and most of the corporate world,
| especially HR. If you like your job, or just like being able
| to post your thoughts on social media, you ignore it at your
| peril.
| zck wrote:
| https://archive.is/5kYUW
| a-r-t wrote:
| There is a good Veritasium episode on her last flight going deep
| into technical details of what went wrong:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTDFhWWPZ4Q
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah this was a great video, so many errors.
|
| The experienced navigator refusing to fly with her was correct,
| but I do wonder if he had been there if he would have been
| smart enough to save them.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| Probably . . . from what I have read in the past, a better
| understanding of radio direction finding probably would have
| been enough to get them to Howland Island.
| dwheeler wrote:
| Yes, the Veritasium episode is great.
|
| In short: there's _plenty_ of evidence Amelia Earhart was
| reckless. I 'm sad that she paid with her life, but that is
| sometimes what happens when you're reckless while using
| dangerous machines.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Captain A. G. Lamplugh, a British pilot from the early days
| of aviation once famously said "Aviation in itself is not
| inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the
| sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness,
| incapacity or neglect."
| spankibalt wrote:
| > Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous.
|
| Yes, it is. Otherwise, "any carelessness, incapacity or
| neglect" wouldn't be so "terribly unforgiving".
| marcosdumay wrote:
| In car transit (like most things in life), you can do
| everything right and still die. In aviation, if you do
| everything right, you'll land safely.
| ephou7 wrote:
| The two pilots in the Tenerife aircrash would beg to
| differ.
| gambiting wrote:
| >> In aviation, if you do everything right, you'll land
| safely.
|
| The pilots who died in the 787 MAX crashes would
| disagree. They did everything exactly as they were
| trained to do and still crashed.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> 787 MAX _
|
| You are thinking of the 737 MAX [0]. There is no such
| thing as a 787 MAX yet [1].
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner
| gambiting wrote:
| Yes obviously, sorry that was a typo.
| krisoft wrote:
| > In car transit (like most things in life), you can do
| everything right and still die.
|
| Same with aviation. The DHL Flight 611 over Uberlingen,
| Iran Air Flight 655, Ukraine International Airlines
| Flight 752, American Airlines Flight 5342, Pan Am Flight
| 1736 are just the few easy ones which comes to mind
| immediately.
|
| > if you do everything right, you'll land safely.
|
| You. And the people who designed your aircraft. The
| people who maintain your aircraft. And the ATC. And other
| pilots. And the people on the ground operating anti-
| aircraft missiles.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Agreed. It is like saying a tightrope isn't trying to
| harm you, just don't fall off.
| deepsun wrote:
| Yep, and how my instructor said, what's worse is that the
| sky can let you enjoy being careless 100 times and then
| punish.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| That's just life.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Same thing with farmers: it's usually the old,
| experienced farmers who die in dumb ways. They've been
| doing the same dangerous thing their whole lives and
| become complacent until it catches up with them.
| cylinder714 wrote:
| A 1993 article from the U.S. Naval Institute's _Proceedings_ on
| how her lack of radio savvy was a major factor in the tragedy:
|
| https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/1993/d...
|
| An example: she or somebody had a retractable antenna optimized
| for long-range high-frequency/shortwave radio _removed_ prior to
| the flight--crazy!
|
| HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39239964
| anonymousiam wrote:
| They probably ditched the transceiver because it weighed
| 40-60lbs, which is a lot of extra weight for something that you
| don't need, based upon "success oriented" planning.
|
| (The linked article says Earhart didn't know enough about
| radio, either to convert from wavelength to frequency, or to
| match an antenna to the transmitter. Such knowledge was
| probably rare in 1937.)
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Sounds like she would have been friends with Stockton Rush if
| she were alive today.
| eterm wrote:
| And indeed if he were alive.
| jahewson wrote:
| Radio had been around for the best part of 40 years by that
| point.
| laverya wrote:
| Compare that to computers, which had been around for the
| best part of 40 years... in 1980.
| johnyzee wrote:
| WTF is with the "coordinated" umlaut... Seriously the New Yorker
| works hard to earn their monocled caricature.
| enmyj wrote:
| They have used an umlaut on the second repeated vowel in a word
| for as long as I've been reading. I can't find a link but I
| believe that's part of their style guide
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| Is this an april fools joke?
| slater wrote:
| It's not. They've always done it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Well, no, they've always used diaereses, but they've
| never had a policy of marking them on "the second
| repeated vowel in a word". You don't see them writing
| about books.
| nkurz wrote:
| Based on your other comments, you probably already
| understand this correctly, but for others who might be
| confused, the actual policy is not that it goes on
| repeated vowels, but that it goes on the second vowel in
| a pair to make clear that it starts another syllable.
| Under this policy, cooperate and naive get diaereses, but
| books never would (unless you were somehow trying to
| indicate a special case where it was pronounced with two
| syllables). Here's more:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)
| slater wrote:
| Yes, because that's not what they're doing.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| It is not, in fact, an umlaut, but a diaeresis, which has the
| same shape but a different linguistic purpose.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)
|
| In fact, the lede paragraph of the Wikipedia article notes
| its retention by _The New Yorker_ manual of style, despite
| being considered archaic.
|
| Direct cited source:
| https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-
| of-...
| db48x wrote:
| You're supposed to do that for any word where two consecutive
| vowels have a syllable break between them instead of forming a
| dipthong. Of course, most of the time it's redundant because
| there's only one cromulent word anyway and the reader can
| figure it out quickly enough without the umlaut.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| I think "supposed to" is overstating it given that I've only
| ever seen it used by this one publication. To boot, I
| wouldn't pronounce the word they use it for, coordination,
| (in context, "piloting it demanded constant coordination")
| with a syllable break, either.
| fluxist wrote:
| The Economist and MIT Technology Review, off the top of my
| head, use the diaresis as well.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That is not true of either publication:
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/22/1117294/a-new
| -at...
|
| > It's the third-dimensional counterpart to latitude and
| longitude, says Sanchez, who helps coordinate the
| standardization effort.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/09/1108076/satel
| lit...
|
| > Now, the scientists were poised to catch this reentry
| as it happened.
|
| https://www.economist.com/graphic-
| detail/2018/12/11/america-...
|
| > The compact is far from perfect. It is vague about how
| countries should cooperate on many issues, such as border
| management and access to public services.
|
| The New Yorker is famous for its commitment to unreality
| on this issue. It's only the New Yorker.
| db48x wrote:
| It's true that most Americans are lazy and do not pay
| sufficient attention in school. Thus the observation of
| nuances such as this are becoming rarer every day.
|
| Do you pronounce the "oo" in "coordination" the same way as
| you do in "bookkeeper"? Because that is a very weird
| mispronunciation.
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coordination
| nayuki wrote:
| For this rule, the word I see most often is "naive". I used
| to write it that way but now I use the simple spelling of
| "naive". The diaeresis emphasizes that "naive" does not rhyme
| with "dive", "five", "hive", "jive", etc.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The diaeresis emphasizes that "naive" does not rhyme with
| "dive", "five", "hive", "jive", etc.
|
| It can't emphasize that; there's nothing to suggest that
| "naive" would rhyme with those words. It emphasizes that it
| doesn't rhyme with "glaive" and "waive"...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Rather than "You're supposed to...", it would be more
| accurate to say, "It was once a common convention--that has
| since mostly been abandoned and is retained as a general rule
| only in a small minority of publications, of which the New
| Yorker is the most notable--to..."
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)
|
| Indicates that the two o's are separate syllables.
| globular-toast wrote:
| In French. It's long since disappeared from English, even in
| words like "naive".
|
| It's pointless in English because we have nothing remotely
| close to phonetic spelling.
|
| If we want to bring back cool things from French can we start
| with reverting to spellings like "connexion", "reflexion"
| etc.?
| JimDabell wrote:
| It hasn't disappeared. You're literally commenting on an
| example of it being used in English.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It isn't used in English in any context other than
| writing published in the New Yorker... except for the
| word "naive" (and "naif"), where it is still sometimes
| used. The criticism of the New Yorker is well founded.
| JimDabell wrote:
| I've never been published in the New Yorker, and I use
| it. People with the names Chloe, Zoe, etc. might be
| surprised to hear they have been imagining their names
| too.
|
| It's in use. It hasn't disappeared. It's _not the norm_ ,
| but it is definitely still in use.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Girls' names can hardly be considered "English". I've
| seen all of Chloe, Aimee, Zoe etc. There are no rules.
|
| It was hard for me to type those on my English keyboard.
| That's reason enough for me to say they are not really
| part of English any more and haven't been for decades. I
| do like writing connexion sometimes, and I note that this
| isn't even considered a spelling error in my installed
| dictionary, unlike coordinate, but I'm not going to claim
| that it's "still in use" because I read a dictionary one
| time.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > I'm not going to claim that it's "still in use" because
| I read a dictionary one time.
|
| It's not "still in use" because it's in the dictionary.
|
| It's "still in use" _because it's still in use_.
| caycep wrote:
| the monocle gives them permission
| atombender wrote:
| The New Yorker does it because it needs to project an air of
| sophistication, even though it's basically The Atlantic with
| cartoons and a NYC-local bias. It's no New York Review of
| Books.
|
| It's a similar kind of conservative affectation as The New York
| Times referring to people as "Mr. Putin" or "Mrs. Clinton". I
| find it hilarious that the NYT will never refer to someone by
| their first name, even when it's contextually more apt to do
| so, and will often use a stiffly formal version of their full
| name ("Vladimir V. Putin") that nobody else in the world
| bothers with outside encyclopedias.
| genewitch wrote:
| What meaning of conservative? Because the deep south has that
| affectation too. Everyone is mister or Mrs or Mz (my favorite
| by far). When talking to a child about someone it's Mr. Given
| Name. In polite company when discussing a non-mutual
| acquaintance of some regard, it might revert to Mrs. Surname.
|
| I am also constantly called sir and I cannot say "ma'am" like
| the people out here so I don't bother with that frivolity.
| They also say "no" with extra vowels that are somewhat
| silent, like noueh, it ends more in the nose than a normal
| "no"
|
| So that's the link I drew.
| atombender wrote:
| The examples you give are not written media. If you look at
| newspapers in the deep south, I'm willing to bet that
| they're not referring to people as "Mr" and "Mrs" (and a
| quick check seems to confirm this).
|
| Secondly, the NYT is not in the deep south and doesn't
| abide by local conventions, so it stands out relative to
| its peers (e.g. LA Times, etc.).
| toast0 wrote:
| Conservative in the meaning of not changing lightly.
| Conserving the current state (which for English style in
| the New Yorker is now rather old style, but why change?)
| bauble wrote:
| "Earhart planned to have human navigators on board with her, but
| she'd be the first female pilot to accomplish the feat." - What
| an odd statement. Could "male" have been replaced by "human"?
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| The strangest TIL for me this year is that Fred Noonan was
| indeed on board for the doomed flight, and he was just as
| lost/dead as Earhart was.
|
| I've surely conflated Earhart with Lindbergh, who was known for
| his _solo_ marathon flights, and somehow absorbed decades '
| worth of pop-culture "Amelia Earhart" legends that left Captain
| Noonan as a remarkably obscure footnote in history.
|
| And even more interesting still were the accounts that a
| disastrous landing in Hawaii carried a crew of four, and her
| penultimate attempt had a crew of three, with an aborted
| takeoff that severely damaged her Electra, and the third man
| had refused/declined to continue as the odds were increasingly
| not in their favor.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I like stories like this. They remind me of two things: 1) you
| have to be a little crazy to make history (and become an
| inspiration), 2) there's no need to whitewash, ignore, or silence
| the tellings of imperfections of "heroes"; their [often
| inaccurate] legend will live on anyway.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| Almost all flight during this stage of development was reckless.
| It took a long time for us to collectively learn the lessons as
| pilots, mechanics, engineers, logistics, etc, to make it safe. A
| great source of reckless piloting stories are from the Alaska
| bush in the 1920's. People like Eielson and Wilkins managed to
| land on drift ice and fly from Alaska across the Arctic Ocean to
| Europe in 1928. A great book to read about this is The Flying
| North by Jean Potter (1946), which chronicles the Alaska bush
| pilots from the 1900s to 1940s, when she was stationed in Alaska
| during WWII.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's reckless and there's reckless.
|
| One is doing something that nobody knows if it's going to work,
| and probably won't - Lindberg, perhaps.
|
| Another is doing something you should KNOW isn't going to work,
| but you don't bother or care.
| cameldrv wrote:
| The publicity machine is pretty amazing. There are hundreds of
| books about Amelia Erhart and probably hundreds of thousands of
| girls and women named Amelia, but who even knows the name of the
| first woman to fly around the world?
| sevg wrote:
| Your question was rhetorical, but for anyone that doesn't know:
| it was Jerrie Mock
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrie_Mock
| cameldrv wrote:
| It was actually Richarda Morrow-Tait, according to the Amelia
| Erhart criteria, i.e. a male navigator is allowed. Similarly
| no one had ever heard of Albert Cushing Read, Walter Hinton,
| or Elmer Fowler Stone, the first men to fly the Atlantic, or
| John Alcock and Arthur Brown, the first men to fly the
| Atlantic nonstop, but everyone has heard of Charles
| Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic nonstop solo.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| The Wikipedia account of Morrow-Tait's "circumnavigation"
| is passing strange, particularly the way it was interrupted
| for 5 months but "resumed" with a completely different
| aircraft and navigator?
|
| I think some janky editor messed with it last year and
| nobody has noticed or checked the sources.
|
| And concerns/mockery of "the flying housewife" alone in
| close quarters with a handsome navigator, gave way to an
| affair while en route, a love-child, and divorce? And there
| is a post on the Talk page from someone claiming to be that
| child... bonkers!
|
| And Wikipedia says [unsourced] they "reached Japan [having
| flown northeast from Calcutta and Vietnam] but were denied
| permission to cross Russia [known in the 1940s as the
| Soviet Union]" -- so what parts of "Russia" were east of
| Japan in 1948?
| lucozade wrote:
| > what parts of "Russia" were east of Japan in 1948
|
| As it says she flew from Japan to the Aleutian islands,
| it would have probably been safer to fly via the
| Kamchatka peninsular instead of direct.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I think some janky editor messed with it last year and
| nobody has noticed or checked the sources.
|
| Wikipedia isn't concerned with that kind of thing.
|
| Compare
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_configuration ,
| where the article states "R and S refer to _rectus_ and
| _sinister_ , Latin for right and left, respectively",
| despite the facts that (1) it's not like the Latin word
| for _right_ is obscure; (2) the claim was highlighted as
| false (in a different section of the article, where it
| still also appears) on the talk page in 2018.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| But this is truly the correct usage, despite your
| original research; you (and the nobodies on Talk page)
| should have referred to the reliable secondary sources
| instead. Chemists are better at Latin than you gave them
| credit for.
|
| https://authors.library.caltech.edu/records/z1ms9-63w28
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recto_and_verso#Etymology
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| [flagged]
| tomhow wrote:
| > No, you're just a moron.
|
| Please edit swipes out of comments. It's one of the first
| and most important things we ask for in the Comments
| section of the guidelines.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| joarv0249nw wrote:
| Magellan is know for first circumnavigating the earth, but
| he died in the Philippines, about half way around.
| wat10000 wrote:
| He had been to the Philippines before, coming from the
| other way.
| 6031769 wrote:
| In the UK at least Alcock and Brown are quite well known. I
| would estimate public knowledge of them here is on a par
| with Lindbergh.
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