Tale of two children

by philg

Photos from a recent visit to a friend’s house in suburban Massachusetts…

The daughter, an elementary school student, baked cookies from “women owned” dough:

(But how can anyone be sure that the owners of this dough company continued to identify as “women” after the package was printed and distributed into grocery stores?)

The son, a middle school student, showed off a home-decorated coffee mug:

6 thoughts on “Tale of two children”

    • That is a long article! The author slings a lot of mud at foreigners, a time-honored U.S. tradition, especially if they’re Asian foreigners. About 3/4 of the way down he does note “The MCAS as it was designed and implemented was a big mistake.”

      Near the end he says “What we had in the two downed airplanes was a textbook failure of airmanship. In broad daylight, these pilots couldn’t decipher a variant of a simple runaway trim,”

      Except that runaway trim is never simple! And since Boeing didn’t put in a $2 speech chip to say “I’m trimming forward” into the headsets, it was unrealistic to expect the pilots to figure it out. Here’s a story about two Americans with more than 20,000 combined flying hours who weren’t able to handle runaway trim: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/july/pilot/turbine-pitch-trim-runaway (see also https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR0906.pdf )

      Instead of demanding that the B737 MAX have 1/1000th of the systems intelligence of a DJI drone, he is demanding that all pilots exhibit excellent airmanship all of the time. Certainly there are some heroes out there, but remember that even during World War II (the age of aeronautical heroism?) we lost more aircraft due to mistakes than due to enemy action. Airline passengers shouldn’t have to bet their lives that the pilots won’t make any mistakes.

    • What about the idea that if you do not like what happened when you threw the last switch put it back or if the airplane is fighting you then turn off the AP and trim and just fly it yourself. The opposite is also true. If you do not like what you are doing then turn it on (VFR into IMC or too much workload). There is also “Do not push a dusty switch”.

    • While I agree with you Phil it does seem like we have a bit of a real-world A/B test here in that the Max was flown by a lot of different types of pilots, and it seems like misfires in the US resulted in pilots going “NO! BAD PLANE!” while elsewhere they led to crashes. Of course it’s possible that this outcome was statistically possible without any pilot differences, but it’s still interesting. The US aviation training system has some material differences from most others, especially in the last decade. Pretty much all US airline pilots spent (and many continue to spend) significant time in loosely-regulated 91/135 ops.

      On a related note, I find it interesting that despite constant horror stories about corner-cutting in China’s airline industry, accidents there seem as rare as in first-world countries.

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