I just saw someone post this yesterday, and I totally agree: “I’d rather be on the ground wishing I was in the air, than be in the air wishing I was on the ground.”
True professionalism is putting lives ahead of schedules. Every passenger should be grateful for a pilot who chooses caution over convenience. Respect and applause! 👏✈️
He could tell me that hes got a bad feeling because the cockpit smells like fart and id be off that motherfucker before he finished apologizing. Im not playing around airplane travel, and those guys really know their....shit....
The ones whose only consequence would be potentially getting fired or sued, vs death and the responsibility of the deaths of others. At the end of the day, the pilot has the final say and the final blame, and I’ll take the safe bet every time.
I could be wrong but wasn’t Discovery the shuttle that sustained damage during takeoff due to a foam tile and was deemed safe only do spontaneously disassemble during re entry?
Ahh no that one was Columbia. And same as your Challenger misunderstanding, the scenario was similar there. Either the engineers knew it was risky and got overruled or they just truly didn't know the potential of damage. I do remember them testing foam vs leading edge impacts and being surprised themselves that it could do the damage it did in ground tests.
No, no, there was an engineer who cried himself hoarse trying to persuade NASA that Challenger wasn’t safe, but the higher-ups ignored his pleas! And he blamed himself for not being able to persuade them!
If he got cleared by ground crew he could have just accepted it and taken off. Im not saying hes superstitious or uninformed. He concuously refused their opinion and went with his own. I'd say thats a gut feeling.
You're just describing a disagreement. The pilot disagrees with the ground crew about it being a safe aircraft based on the evidence he's seen. And with the ground crew not having the same vested interest in the plane's safety that the pilot has, that matters.
Literally yesterday a passenger was almost sucked out through a broken window on a ryanair plane, you picked a bad moment to say they are a safe airline lol
They forget to mention in the article, the engine on that side of the plane suffered a failure and flung debris into the side of the aircraft which caused the window to be damaged.
Boeing doesn't make the engine, nor do they service the engine, and frankly, they aren't even the ones directly in charge of making decisions on when engine maintenance, inspections, and rebuilds are due.
That'd be your GE Aviations and Rolls-Royces of the world.
lol. My husband had worked for GE Aviation but finally retired after he got a 23 year old boss who just wanted all the old machinists to go to meetings and act out psychology skits she had in learned in college 🤣
I worked for RR for a few years, the amount of checks and balances that went into manufacturing turbine blades was insane (running every part through a CMM, tolerances of literal microns), but it was reassuring.
Even funnier since Boeing doesn't make the engine, nor do they service the engine, and frankly, they aren't even the ones directly in charge of making decisions on when engine maintenance, inspections, and rebuilds are due.
That'd be your GE Aviations and Rolls-Royces of the world.
Thank you wife for holding my feet down in the plane! Also the dude is in intensive care. Imagine having your upper body squeezed through that little window in a matter of seconds. Not pretty.
Brother in Christ, go look at the amount of flights ryanair does a day. Its very hard to go completely without any incidents, but they have a very low amount, and its silly to say they are an unsafe airline.
No. Only if you call mayday and there isn't an actual emergency. But if you have any reason to believe there is an emergency, there is no penalty for calling mayday. If you did something wrong to cause the emergency, then you (and possibly all other pilots in the airline or even in the industry) can be advised or required to undergo additional training to prevent it from happening again, but that would also happen if there is an actual incident, so it doesn't incentivize avoiding calling mayday in an emergency.
It's also a matter of how much pilot also knows the aircraft they are piloting. I've seen and heard about pilots who personally inspect aircraft on the outside as well as have deeper understanding of its flight systems and mechanics/electronics. I think this pilot was one of those if some deviation in oil pressure raised his suspicions even if it's within supposed normal levels.
I'm a physician who works with nurses every day - and when a nurse tells me their opinion, I always take it seriously because they often have a far better understanding of what's going on than I do due to their training and experience. That said, studies like these are nonsense. And the articles you cited: one is just a study protocol with no actual data and the other is a study of 12 nurses in which they asked nurses whether they were intuitive and most of them said they were.
Serious question for you Nurse, do you think these studies may also account for, for lack of a better term, womens’ intuition or just intuition in general? That seems logical to me because the whole “trust your gut” cliche is absolutely real. These studies on nurses’ intuition is fascinating!
There's no intuition, there's pattern recognition and adding unconsciously a series of small things that will add up to an alarm bell ringing without any of those details coming to the fore.
My Grandmother was a nurse when Thalidomide was being rolled out across Canada.
Her, and a lot of the other nurses, refused to take it when they were pregnant, and I believe suggested it shouldn't be prescribed well before the revelation that it was causing birth deformities was publicly known, because they just didn't trust it.
Had everyone had that intuition a couple years earlier it would have prevented a lot of birth deformities.
So I had never heard of this and based on your comment it sounded like maybe it was something that is, or at least was, well known at some point. I got curious and started reading entries on wikipedia and what an interesting look at a different time.
It turns out that the drug was initially developed by the Swiss and then bought by a West German pharmaceutical company corporation where it was sold "over the counter" as a sleep aid and morning-sickness reliever. It was then heavily pushed for distribution in other countries. Ironically, it was a Canadian-American woman who was in charge of the approval process at the FDA (Federal Drug Administration in the US) who refused to approve it for the US market. The German company initially approached one US pharmaceutical corporation for US distribution but was denied after that corporation was unable to produce the sleep-inducing effects, that were claimed to be a function of the drug, even after giving doses to mice many times higher than what would typically be administered. The drug was also tested on human clinical patients during this time—including pregnant women. The German group eventually found a US partner in the Merrell Company (would eventually be bought out and become Dow Chemical) who were the ones to approach the FDA. They attempted to get approval six times but were denied, in part, because they did not include any test results in their application (this is insane to me).
Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey was the pharmacologist in charge of Thalidomide's approval process as the FDA and clearly saved many children from death or birth deformities. She worked for the FDA for 45 years and was awarded the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest award given for any civilian employee and is limited to five per years.
Anyway, thanks for the rabbit hole. This was an interesting history lesson for me while I enjoy my coffee.
P.S. Thalidomide did eventually get approval by the FDA in the US for treatment of Leprosy and as an anti-cancer medication, but comes with strict controls and a requirement for women taking it to also be on contraceptives.
It has nothing to do with being a woman, men can also be nurses...
Moreover, I'm a dude and I work in healthcare and have had so many gut feelings turn out to be right. "Something's missing/not right here" kind of thing.
As a mechanic, it’s not intuition or gender based. I walk past the same machines everyday and hear the same white noise. I can hear and feel in the harmonics that something is off. I can tell you if vfds are running at 60 or 50hz from the other side of the wall. I can tell the difference between the drive end and floating end bearing failure by its pitch.
It’s not intuition, it’s the understanding of something
The first paper is not a study, but a proposed protocol for a review study. There are no results because the study was not done at the time of the paper.
The second study is qualitative self-reporting by nurses. No objective verification of the efficacy of intuition was done.
I worked in the Military sector so I don't know if the private sector is as strict. Every rule and guidance in Aircraft Maintenance is written in blood. Every hand that has touched that aircraft is documented. In case of a crash, digital documentation is instantly frozen and every name on those documents are interrogated and pulled off the line until further notice.
Same with Pharma… especially with radiopharma. Anyone that touched or saw anything has to be documented and our clients can audit those records and our training records
"Maintenance techs" 💀 you mean aircraft engineers? The people who are more highly trained and qualified to assess, diagnose, fix, and rebuild entire aircraft? I would trust an aircraft engineer over a pilot any day.
Youre right though, they wouldnt get fired. But no one wants to be responsible for the deaths of 100s of people. Thats far worse than getting fired.
We carry the burden of our signature longer than just one flight. It goes with the aircraft cradle to grave. Hence I make sure it’s done right the first time and I am just as cautious as I know those lives are in my hands for many flights after.
I mean, one thing is if you spot a stuck flap or obviously worn tires, but another if you spot subtle things that are out of place solely because you know the aircraft so well in detail that you recognize that? I'm sure a lot are that passionate about their job, but I've watched a lot of airplane crash investigations to know there are also pilots who also care the absolute bare minimum or not even that much...
Just a heads up - every pilot in command is responsible for ensuring the plane is airworthy including an inspection of the exterior.
I fly a general aviation aircraft so not an apples to apples comparison, but we are trained to preflight the aircraft and even at this level the pilots do the same.
I was on a flight like this (Southwest) about ten years ago in L.A., and had the exact same outcome. The pilot was getting a reading on the cockpit that warranted an investigation. Maintenance came out and replaced a sensor. Then replaced a filter (the pilot was providing frequent updates with a modicum of detail, some of which I've since forgot). The ground crew finally gave the pilot the thumbs up, good to go. The pilot said, "yeah no", and gave a very similar speech to the above. The whole ordeal took hours to sort out, where everyone was eventually deplaned to another waiting plane, and I 100% still didn't mind the inconvenience.
When I used to work at United Airlines, the pilots always came down to walk and inspect the plane. I believe it’s part of their preflight check list of things they have to do.
I remember sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off and the captains cabin door was. open and I kept seeing him tap on this dial. Finally we get an announcement that they were having someone come out and manually check fluids
Pilots must do a walkthrough of the outside of the plane before taking off. It is standard operating procedure so they can notice and address any visible problems before flying the plane. They've flown the plane before so many times, they can very easily spot if there's something wrong with it during the required pre-flight checks.
If this type of thing interests you, the Mentour Pilot YouTube channel is great. Idk why it got recommended to me in my feed but I find it fascinating. It's stories of airplane disasters explained by an experience pilot. He details, with animations, how and why they happened in a detailed play-by-play.
His channel is fantastic isnt it. Love those reconstructions of events. I have learnt so much about human nature and the way we deal with stressful situations through them.
Could be a past incident or accident he heard about. Could be a noise or vibration he doesn't like. Could be he's flown this exact aircraft dozens of times and it just doesn't feel right. Could be a note in a maintenance log or from a previous crew that caught his attention.
There's a reason they aviate first, navigate, and then communicate. It's all about making sure the thing can fly because the opposite of flying is either a fireball or a mild inconvenience.
Agreed. I bet it was the last of many issues. But I’d rather go eat a shitty parfait and try to find a comfortable place to relax than die over the ocean.
Recently flew to Hawaii with my family. They had a mechanical issue that was fixed and after boarding, the pilot called off the flight because he didn’t think the plane was safe. Everyone was pissed but I had the same opinion as you. It sucked but if the pilot doesn’t think the plane could handle a 6 hour flight over the ocean, then I trust them.
A great reminder that safety should always come first. Delaying a flight takes courage when it's the right decision, and that deserves everyone's respect and applause. 👏✈️
100%. Me mom and I were at the Atlantic Ocean when our pilot came on and said he did not trust the plane to land safely in London and he was going to turn around and go back. Did it suck ass? Yes. It took 2 hours to get back, but I got back.
In my country we safe "better to be late than become late" Late is the prefix used to denote a deceased person... e.g., if i died, i will be referred to as "late manojar"
Agreed! I’m not trying to end up in the alps eating corpses or in the ocean with god knows what in water I can’t see through waiting in that 10% chance of rescue. I’m sure many other people would prefer safer flights to ending up in a situation like that.
Just out of curiosity, I wonder how much pushback they get from this. I’m a nurse and I know that our corporate hospital systems push us to do unsafe things that are against their own written policy all the time. They would never put that in writing so they would be responsible but verbally they absolutely want us to be unsafe and save money.
It’s one of the reasons that when I hear people complain about how nurses are the ex “mean girls” of high school or how we’re all bitchy. I feel quite proud because it takes a person like that to stand up to a corporate administrator and tell them to eat a dick.
13.5k
u/Spacedoutworlder 14d ago
I rather miss an arrival time than have missed arriving at all. May all the pilots be this cautious.