Is it a fact that Airline crash investigators are not big believers in coincidences how ever obvious they may seem?
Is it a fact that Airline crash investigators are not big believers in coincidences how ever obvious they may seem?
I'm not an NTSB investigator, but for 48 years I made a good living as a troubleshooter. Troubleshooting is an investigative discipline.
It is not that investigators do not believe in coincidences; it is that anything that appears to be a coincidence has to be investigated to an extraordinary degree to rule out an identifiable causality. Coincidences are the most effort-intensive items in any investigation.
A few years ago I was tasked with identifying the root cause of a recurrent loss of two 45Mb connections (one or the other, never both together) that spanned more than a hundred miles of our state and left no trail except for alarms at the end equipment. With so little data, I started looking at the patterns. All the outages lasted between 13 and 14 1/2 minutes. Of the 13 recorded, 90% occurred between 9 p.m. And midnight, with fully half occurring between 11 p.m. And midnight. None occurred between midnight and 1:00 a.m. - something knew what time it was. When I hunted it down the time itself didn't matter at all - it was the result of system backup traffic that was scheduled to complete before midnight. The long strings of zeroes in the traffic produced an excessive error rate in microwave radios that had no idea what time it was, and that in turn triggered a bug in the new firmware of a Sonet node miles from either end. If I had dismissed the time as a coincidence, no matter how much it looked like that, I would have had a devil of a time figuring out the rest of it.
There are coincidences, but they are not coincidences until all possible causes are ruled out.
No
The word "coincidence" would never be listed as "cause of accident" in an investigator's report. The actual cause of the accident, if determined, would be explained in great detail and the fact that it was a coincidence and seemingly related to another similar accident might never be mentioned unless it was to disprove a previous conclusion.
It is a fact that an investigator should make no assumptions and take nothing for granted.
"Co-incidence" means instances that happen at the same time (the "co") bit. As such, there ALWAYS be things that just manage to happen at the same time.
Aircraft design is intended to make any random single event one that is unable to bring a plane down. That is why there's redundancy in all systems.
In the case of the recent 737MAX crashes, it would seem that one of the factor could be the expectations of the crew regarding the airplane behavior. Those planes are new, and would feel familiar, perhaps TOO familiar, for pilots previously flying another variant of the 737 -- Lion Air has 40 737-800, and recently started adding 737MAX8; Ethiopian Airlines already has 16 737-800 and is adding 737MAX8. Take a crew "overly comfortable" with the 737-800 and transition them to the 737MAX8 and the small differences may go unnoticed until something happens. Then the old reflexes would kick in and make them do something inappropriate for the 737MAX8.
Airline crash investigators are analytical, not a lot of superstitious noobs.
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