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I'd like to point to this post about the V-22, illustrating the very same decline in engineering culture and institutional accountability which matches what we see almost everywhere else we shift our gaze. This becomes more egregious when:
The culture war is a war between collapse and the the truths which maintain industrial civilization.
"The crash led directly to the NTSB's recommendation of using different runways for takeoffs and landings at LAX."
LAX has 4 runways. They all face the same direction. Why would they ever not use separate runways for takeoffs and landings?
The simple-but-wrong answer is capacity; you can squeeze more flights in, and LAX gets busy. But that's not as true as you'd expect, for wake turbulence and flight separation reasons.
The more complex answer... LAX's terminal design is a mess, and a lot of runway incursion concerns were (and remain!) about other types of collision. Especially at the time, Tenerife was the Central Example of a fatal runway incident, and involved an aircraft taking off and colliding with another aircraft taxing to takeoff that had crossed the runway; the next most well-known in 1991 would have been Heartsfield's landing-landing impact.
Using the 'far' runways for LAX for arrivals and 'near' runways for departures (as is the current practice, though it's still not always applied) would reduce the risk of landing on someone trying to take off, but it also means increased risk of collision between and aircraft taking off and an aircraft taxing, because simply using the 'far' runways with LAX's layout requires crossing the near ones. Runway crossing during taxi was both a well-known risk at the time, and one that was believed to be harder to mitigate. So the thumb went on that side of the scale.
The solution that comes to my mind is using the North runways for departures and the South runways for arrivals (or vice-versa). Would this cause taxi times to be unreasonabe? Aerodynamic turbulence issues?
Wouldn't be great for taxiing, but that's probably solvable, especially since LAX keeps getting additional taxi options.
Bigger issue's minimum separation distance: the FAA rules for wake turbulence are arcane, but the north runways are either on the hairy edge of being so close that they hit the delay requirements as a rule or well within them, and the south pair are only a little better. There are still rules for mixed operations on nearby parallel runways, but they're a lot less strict, and allow much higher capacity.
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Wow, thanks for sharing I'm glad I didn't miss that post. In case people don't know the OP of the reddit thread's username is an homage to the very pilot that was involved in the crash. The pilot was an active redditor that, as his username suggests, sought to dispel the misconceptions surrounding the the V-22.
Mostly he spent a lot of time explaining it was statistically average when it came to flight hours per crash when compared to other rotary aircraft. The kind of viral stuff that doesn't matter to Marines engaging in morbid bants or casual History Channel guys explaining how the M1 Garand ping was a problem that alerted Nazis a soldier ran out of ammo.
It's ironic that what were known, solvable parts failures in the V-22 likely had a major hand in killing the one guy who was so publicly committed to explaining how perfectly fine the aircraft is. For him to be blamed the same as a parts failure is borderline ridiculous if that post is accurate.
Does anyone know why that account was suspended? I had to google the username to remember, found another Osprey AMA on reddit (may be the same person) and they also have a suspended account. I know the wife of /u/UR_WRONG_ABOUT_V22/ took over the account shortly after the November '23 incident. Unless it was some LARP, stolen valor incident, or "suspended" is the same as deleted, then that seems very strange. As far as I know GUNDAM-22 (a pilot in the Nov 23 crash) was /u/UR_WRONG_ABOUT_V22/.
As for your larger point, while I agree we'll see material damages from a competency crisis I'm not sure this is the best example. For an aircraft that already has a controversial reputation it wouldn't surprise me that "pilot error" would find its way pushed up the who-to-blame ladder. If the V-22 is useful, good enough, and safe enough, but carries an unwarranted reputation, then review boards have good reason to fear the whole truth. It can fly faster and further than other rotary craft. It doesn't take many senators that have use for a Save Our Troops crusade to jeopardize this capability.
That said, bureaucrats placing blame to protect Boeing contracts and their credibility alone is disgusting and, I agree, emblematic of wider corruption. Do I expect this issue to be addressed? Yeah. Would I expect better risk management, manufacturing/quality control? Not really. That would be also be a good crusade for a senator, but you can't replace Boeing in a day.
It happened quite recently. His wife was active a few weeks ago, it says deleted here: https://old.reddit.com/r/LessCredibleDefence/comments/1egsd44/air_force_makes_big_changes_after_the_osprey/
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what does this really have to do with culture war? ospreys have been killing soldiers for decades, shitty gear in general for centuries. "Every Marine is a cynic, and every cynic knows our equipment is made by the lowest bidder." -lieutenant from generation kill
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I mean it’s certainly true that people who directly maintain industrial civilization are mostly on one side of the culture war, rather than the other(mostly- there’s plenty of eg, nurses and IT guys who are on the other side), but the actual issues being fought over are generally not directly connected to the direct maintenance of industrial civilization itself.
There are also plenty of nurses and IT guys on the red team, certainly more than doctors and software engineers. My top-of-head prediction was 60-40 one way or another. I did look it up though, “IT support technician” was much more Democratic than I thought (75%) though “Vice President of Information Technology” almost perfectly fit my 60-40 split in favor of the Dems. This might be class effects, but I think it’s just age effects.
But I’d challenge that this means 70% of IT guys are woke. IT guys are ground zero of grey tribe. If they’re liberals, they’re tits-and-beer liberals. A huge chunk are libertarians. And the Republicans are split between normie men who tinker in their garage and insane crazy reactionaries who want to overthrow democracy and institute a monarchy. (Presumably using group policy objects.) I’m sure there’s a progressive chunk but they’re less loud. IT is too low-status and too weird for anything as boringly white-collar as that.
Basically, IT guys are The Motte.
A monarchy running on Windows? I shall fight against this travesty to my last bitter breath.
If the IT guys establish a dictatorship, the revolution will run on Azure. I'm sorry.
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We all know the coming monarchy will run on Temple OS.
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I think there's some truth to this. But the knife edge between modern industrial civilization and catastrophic failure has always been pretty sharp. I don't think I've ever talked to someone on the inside of any complex structure (government, corporate leadership, engineering) that doesn't characterize the whole thing as being held together by duct tape and baling wire. I think there's a bit of a bias toward seeing that, historically, these systems mostly worked (which is true, mostly) and comparing it to near misses today, which isn't really a fair comparison. Not to say that we can't invest in making systems more robust (We do! And we should!), but the idea that the Incomprehensibly Stable Systems of the past are falling apart is quite the anachronism: we've always been flying by the seat of our pants.
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That's a fascinating reddit post. Also see this post on X discussing the technology and crash. I have 20 years in the Navy but no real insights to add. Yep, we have some cool technology that does things like automatically detect and burn off debris that gets into the gearbox. Yep, the people operating the machines don't really understand all the nuances. "The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots."
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I think that part is unquestionably true, but one thing I keep coming back to is just how easy it is to avoid or shift blame for catastrophic outcomes when the people making the decisions are in offices answering emails and doing spreadsheets thousands of miles from places where their consequences will be seen and quite often spread through several layers of bureaucracy between themselves and implementation of the policies they set in an e-mail while looking at numbers in a spreadsheet.
To be blunt about that part of the problem, the buck doesn’t stop there if someone in the C-suite hires a person incapable of the work, he knows he’s not going to be personally responsible for the outcome. He can blame those below him — the hiring manager, HR people, the hired person themselves— for anything that actually happens. He didn’t cause the near miss on the runway. It was all those people below him who didn’t implement his ideas properly. It’s quite often that those who defend the idea of DEI say that they don’t intend to lower quality, but to get more minorities who are capable into those positions. It’s the fault of those below for not seeing through the “hire diverse or else” rules to find competent candidates. If the C-suites were held responsible for failures, there would be less of a quality decline, because like everyone else the executive would value his reputation and keeping his job.
Well said. Venkat Rao talks about this in the Gervais Principle. Basically, the modern corporate world is a shell game where sociopathic corporate execs strategically move other people around like game pieces in order to wage a clandestine war with each other within an organization. It's chilling once you realize the scale.
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I don't know, I heard the same narrative about commercial air travel but the actual numbers are such that passenger deaths are basically flat even as passenger numbers continue increasing superlinearly. Given any particular case report, it's easy to stare into the abyss for too long and convince yourself that it represents a totally new excess of dysfunction and malfeasance, but as someone who has binge-read multiple writeups of almost every major plane crash in history my sense is that chains of absurd mistakes, coverups and ass-covering are the default and have been since we started keeping records.
On top of this, the American military, in particular, has been subjected to its own peculiar shift since the 90s (or even earlier) as its incentives drifted away from winning a peer war towards being a jobs programme and peacock tail for the American state. Your platforms don't need to be cheap for their supply chains to form a highly liquid way of allocating pork as part of political negotiations, and they don't need to be particularly safe and effective as long as they look cool and you can cover up any persuasive data that they might actually not do well in a war. Internally, there will never be a shortage of schmucks to show-fly Ospreys around Japan, no matter how often they crash or how unfairly the schmucks are blamed for the crashes (people do far more risky things for glory and thrills!). Therefore, the military has no reason to run a complex system that deploys safe airplanes, but this does not have to indicate that other parts of American society are incapable of doing that, or have gotten worse at building other complex systems.
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