This is par for the course for HN; smart people applying first-principle thinking on unfamiliar domains for about a minute, which confirms the biases of other outsiders who vote the plausible, but not-quite-right comments to the top.
The comments here during the 737 MAX MCAS thing were fucking wild. So many randoms spitting out confidently incorrect nonsense.
Maybe that helps explain some of the fraction of HN that loves LLMs: they found their soulmates.
The trim motors only have 2 speeds - on and off.
Coined by Michael Crichton (the famous author).
The more egregious thing to me though is ignoring the GPWS callouts on approach because they were chasing the glideslope. If you can't maintain a stable approach, you need to go around, it's the first thing you learn.
You expect this behaviour from a first-timer in the sim, not a commercial cargo pilot.
I'm curious - are commercial pilots reprimanded for doing a go-round after messing up the approach?
However I will say that the majority of unstable approaches (97%!!) do continue to landing: https://flightsafety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Go-aroun...
...but I think that most of these unstable approaches are likely marginally unstable and only in one dimension. This landing was so far outside the realm of normal it's actually mind boggling that it actually happened. Pilots are trained to immediately go around without questioning it if many of the things that happened on this flight occur (such as not being in landing configuration well before touching down!)
I'm a pilot, and I don't fly turbofans/jets. Not claiming any "authority", but qualified to comment... It's not "something that basic" unless you fly in that category, there's a lot more to aviation experience than knowing a fact about an engine you don't use. (But hey, congrats to you that you know it!)
> I think a little more restraint is warranted in something like this..
More restraint than saying "unclear <i.e. to me> why ...", an exact statement about what I didn't know, which harms no one and led to several informative explanations by people who know (most of them in good spirit)?
This is what good conversation is about.
...
Anyway, the point I was making holds and is this:
Orthogonal to whether they could/should have gone around at that point, and given that they stayed on the ground after all, it may turn out that that 4 seconds of indecision (instead of pure deceleration) may have directly contributed to the fatalities at the end of the crash.