> The captain's unclear headspace became evident by his protracted tirade. He was likely mentally unfit for the task of captaining that day, and the rant was evidence of it.
You jumped to the same conclusion the author did, which was that the rant was evidence of anything. Some people rant all of the time and sometimes it’s about sexist, racist, whatever things. It does not imply they are mentally unfit for captaining.
> All of the commentary on the violation of the sterile cockpit rule and argument before departure are irrelevant to the actual cause
Which is just as false a statement as it is to say "The violation of the sterile cockpit rule and argument before departure were a significant cause". The fact is, we don't know if it was, but it's not wrong to say that it might be.
Real life is rarely about evidence or not evidence, which is a categorical decision (in contrast to evidence in court, which can be circumstantial).
Some more context in addition to the sibling comment: The classical example is this. You want to test the effectiveness of two drugs A and B in some sort of clinical trial. You gather a lot of data and learn that drug A has an average effectiveness of 4.0, while drug B has 4.9 (more is better). You apply a statistical test and it tells you B is not significantly different from A.
Can you conclude that B is not better than A? You can't. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There could be any number of reasons why we don't have significant evidence, e.g. because the experiment was done with a sample too small. B might be better than A, but there is no evidence it is.
The NTSB gathers a lot of data regarding the crash. The board looks at all the factors and deliberates whether they contributed to the crash. It determines that there is no significant evidence that the mental state of the pilot was relevant.
Can you conclude that the mental state was irrelevant? You can't. It's likely the pilot experienced stress but it is impossible to determine whether this stress was significant. It might well be, but there is no evidence it was.
Parent seems to think it was not a factor. But by relying on a flawed argument we will not find out why he actually thinks that way, ultimately leading to an unproductive discussion.
> The NTSB would have called it out if that were the case.
If there’s protracted conversation unrelated to the safe operation of flight, apparently agitated conversation, being conducted during a critical phase of flight, it seems odd that the official report would not mention what led the NTSB to exclude psychological factors and/or cockpit distractions as a contributing factor. But I don’t read these reports frequently; so maybe that’s not how they are structured. I imagined that they were structured like scientific papers where the conclusions typically anticipate reviewers’ critiques and dealt with them in advance. Then again, there’s no intent of peer review here.
> In the end, the NTSB declined to mention these conversations in its final report, *which is normal — most of the time, the agency doesn’t wade into pilots’ personal disputes*
> Some people rant all of the time and sometimes it’s about sexist, racist, whatever things. It does not imply they are mentally unfit for captaining.
Given the whole idea behind the sterile cockpit rule, I'd say this is clearly wrong. It's true that ranting about mysogynist murder fantasies is probably no worse from a safety perspective (albeit wildly more offensive) than other topics, but ranting about anything is just a no-go in the air. When you're flying the plane you're supposed to be talking about flying the plane, and nothing else.
It really seems like you and other posters here want this blog post to be some kind of woke tirade you need to rebutt. But that's not how most of us are reading it. They mysogyny is the evidence, not the crime. Really the article is pretty dry.
> Some people rant all of the time and sometimes it’s about sexist, racist, whatever things. It does not imply they are mentally unfit for captaining.
That would be even worse: If the captain consistently disregards their training by engaging in unnecessary conversations during designated sterile cockpit periods, it indicates a consistent lack of suitability for the position of captaining an airplane.
There have been some very smart racists in the past. Depending on your definition of racism, it could even include Nobel prize winners from the last century.
> “These are the kind of women you don’t wanna get married to,” he said. “You know, some men, they lose their temper and the next thing you know, the wife is dead, you know… they start punching them and kicking them, and they lost their minds, you know… they kill the woman… it’s the woman who can drive you to do crazy stuff, you know?”
You jumped to the same conclusion the author did, which was that the rant was evidence of anything. Some people rant all of the time and sometimes it’s about sexist, racist, whatever things. It does not imply they are mentally unfit for captaining.
The NTSB would have called it out if that were the case. They did not. For an example of where they would, look at this flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_212