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If you talk about something like aviation, and start with "from layman's perspective", stopping there is usually not such a bad idea.



There is nothing wrong with a layman’s perspective in any industry, and aerospace is not certainly not the sole domain of safety critical systems. An aerospace layman might still bring insight from other areas, which was the case here IMO.

You have been repeatedly dismissing people in this thread, but HN is about being curious. “Leave it to the professionals” is neither satisfying nor interesting.


Curiosity is about learning, isn't it? Nothing wrong with asking questions, or following discussions and learn something new about an industry or domain you don't know a lot about.

Throwing ideas out to improve things, without properly thinking about the the root causes for incidents, not waiting for official investigations to be run, and all of that based on some audio recordings and headlines, or news coverage at best, is neither curious nor allows people to learn something. So yes, at a certain point, leave it to the professionals (whom else would one leave it to anyways?) is exactly the right thing to do. And maybe listen to people with more knowledge on a subject (probably not me in that case so).

Insisting on pre-formed "layman" opinions about something as peculiar as aviation, or aerospace, is the opposite of curiosity.


How are we supposed to learn if you just tell everyone to “leave it to the professionals”?

If you don’t agree with something someone posts, contribute to the discussion by explaining the issues. Why shouldn’t the ATC be sacked? Safety culture. Why shouldn’t they install ground radar? Complexity. Etc.

Appeals to authority are the worst kind of arguments because they don’t help us to understand what to expect from them.

Just think of it as CRM for the internet. :)


Great burn! But not a great refutation.




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