Wow, by all accounts, it seems the union wants to protect the pilots from the consequences of their actions, even if doing so means preventing the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) from documenting the causes of the near-accident on JFK's runways to reduce the risk of similar events in the future.
In other words, the union seems to be looking out for its members at the expense of everyone's safety.
Should we expect a union to support the views of anyone other than its members? The needs of the public are well-represented by the NTSB and any other involved government agencies.
This is also part of a decade-spanning issue re audio recordings. Pilots have long fought to keep recorders out of cockpits. This is an extension of that fight. (Black boxes are different. They are only used in event of a crash and are generally not released publicly unless people are dead.)
This. It’s like saying a defense attorney has a duty to argue for the prosecution.
It’s important that everyone have representation to advocate on their behalf, even in non-judicial settings. Let the union do their job, let the NTSB do theirs, and I hope the pilots are compelled to testify.
A defense attorney does in fact have duties that aren't in the client's best interest.
The court has rules. Each attorney's first duty is to uphold those rules, and the second duty is to argue for the client to the extent and in the manner those rules allow.
This seems quite similar to the process and rules that govern air traffic safety and its incremental improvement over the decades.
As a dirty commie myself, I would love to agree with you but unions have shot themselves in the foot too many times this way. Unions themselves must take responsibility for their public reputation or they stand to disappear. Attorneys don't have that problem.
>> Who would join a union that won’t support its members?
Me. I had many jobs where joining the union was "manditory". Whether it was the union at the universities where i studied or taught, or the union that runs the film industry in which i worked as a kid, there was no practical alternative. None of the unions of which I was forced to be a member ever represented my best interests.
It's a contradiction. Thinking about it involves holding two conflicting thoughts in your mind at the same time. I can't change that. I'm just saying it's never been as simple as some like to pretend it is.
Interesting to see how the escalation works in someones thought process, but these are not valid arguements.
"If you have nothing to hide, you dont need privacy"
Perhaps there are antiquated rules and possibly dangerous flight systems approved by the FAA. Maybe these pilots need to be protected from being publicly persecuted in the interest of corporate profit and confidence in the government.
Yes. If justice means a criminal going to jail, defense attorneys do stand up and fight tooth and claw to prevent that happening. That is thier job. It is the job of the prosecution, the government, to overcome and enforce justice.
I don’t think that’s what justice means. Justice means that only people who a jury believes are guilty of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt go to jail. Defense attorneys serve that definition of justice. One could argue that prosecutors stand in the way of justice because their job is to put someone in jail regardless of whether they are truly guilty. In reality, the adversarial system is justice.
That is nasty and crosses into personal attack, which is not cool. Please don't post like this again. You can make your substantive points without getting aggressive; please do that instead.
We've had to ask you not to break the site guidelines before. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
They nearly had a crash, and they are trying to cover up what happened. I think it is reasonable to assume they are "bad pilots" in this situation until there is more information.
On HN of all places we should realize complicated technical systems result in complicated technical problems and the easiest, lowest status, people to blame are usually not the cause of all problems in a system.
It seems highly likely there could be a problem with ATC giving a misleading or inconsistent clearance, or radio coverage being faulty or inadequate (I said "stop and hold at ground point One Alpha, not stop and hold at ground point One shhhhh"), or signage being inadequate, or the architecture of the airport being inherently faulty by design. No amount of knee jerk punishing the pilots automatically without impartial investigation will fix any of those safety concerns and as such that does not increase the safety of flight. Seems rather odd the NTSB is strongly opposed to a detailed impartial judicial review of their process?
If I had nothing to cover up, and someone asked for a different recording service to be used "no skin off my back" because I have nothing to cover up. Seems like the NTSB is trying to cover something up. I wonder why they would use a non-technical travel blogger to release their side of the story instead of numerous ATC organizations and unions or pilots orgs etc. What a fascinating source for the story?
And, while a complicated technical problem is likely to not be the pilot's fault, after a certain degree of refusing to cooperate with the investigation, it becomes their fault.
Also, onemileatatime is a long-standing news website that reports on the aviation industry; the NTSB "released their side of the story" in press releases.
It could be they had been given bad informations. Unless suicidal I doubt anyone would just cross a lane knowing another plane is taking ofand risk hiting them at full speed.
Also we have no idea from the article if they crossed said lane by being around the safety margins usually set or if it was a close call. I guess there is a lot of safety margin taken in aero between saying "sure you can cross that lane nobody is about to take off" and "a jet is already bombing at full speed on that lane, don't cross!!"
The point of an investigation is to investigate. Not punish someone you are already sure it is the culprit.
The membership may not see them as bad pilots. They may feel that these pilots are being railroaded, or that the incident wasn't as rare/dangerous as is being portrayed.
Have you really never seen the public misinterpret something they aren't all specialists in? Maybe they very much are interested in the truth being public record, and the truth has not yet been determined. No particular bit of evidense, including an audio recording or some interview testimony is 'the truth'.
> By supporting bad pilots they're making them all look bad.
Airlines in particular have a long and pervasive history of blaming "pilot error" for any and all safety issues. Until and unless it is conclusively proven that some maintenance, instructions, or mechanical system was faulty, pilots are in the cross-hairs. Remember the first 737MAX crash?
It is only natural for pilots to be concerned about being scapegoats, or that their on-the-record remarks implicating their airline could end their careers.
Please never read about the MLB player's union. I don't think you'll like watching professional sports after.
Unions are there to protect their members. End of story.
If there is no rule mandating it, I don't get why people are upset at the pilots for not cooperating with an investigation that could be career ending.
This article focuses on the pilots, but the outrage should be focused at the people who made the rules the pilots follow.
But at this stage of the game, the only way to avoid supporting "bad pilots" is for the union to unilaterally decide whether or not the pilots in question are bad and withdraw support if they decide against them. No investigation has been completed , and while the publicly available evidence certainly makes it appear as if the pilots were at fault, I wouldn't feel comfortable concluding that if my decision had any real-life impact, nor am I comfortable with the idea of a union doing the same thing.
> Should we expect a union to support the views of anyone other than its members?
just also note that unions across the board from electricians and plumbers to healthcare workers frequently make the PR claim that their members are higher quality professionals than lower payscale non-union workers, and that they provide higher quality work which is safer for the public.
in this case they are directly subverting the safety standards of their industry in favor of narrow personal interest.
It's in the public interest for the job of advocate to exist and be manned and be performed with as much energy as any other job. There are already far more people whos job is to try to attack them than to defend them. Some day it will be you and I guess everyone should just assume they know you're guilty too. As long as it kinda looks that way to all us who weren't there, good enough!
individual people can hire lawyer advocates as is done across society. It doesn't have to be in a union's purview to turn every individual's screwup into a cause celebre entailing the full collective weight of the organization.
so yes, you're right, it's a choice, it can be done this way, but I'm right to draw conclusions from that as to what role unions play in their struggle vs the public interest.
Maybe you believe the unions should be some policing authority for their respective domains? Well, they're not, and it's not their fault for being different than what you imagined. Their stated goal is to protect their members, which is exactly what they do. There are other authorities mandated to regulate and check and we see them at work right now. So the whole system is working just as designed, nothing to see, let's move on.
This doesn't alter anything. They probably also want any investigation to proceed soberly not sensationally, and they probably also want the union to do their job, knowing that some other day they will need them to do it for them.
The pilot’s union should be allowed to mediate interactions between the pilots and their employer (the airline). If the pilots are found at fault, it should be able to negotiate fair treatment for them. But it should absolutely not be allowed to stonewall government safety investigations. Holy shit, why would you even think that?
If representing the the interests of their members involves picking a fight with the government, the union should do that. If they don’t lose a fight with the NTSB pretty quickly in a case like this, they’ve helpfully exposed a glaring problem with the regulatory framework.
Well, I guess we will find out the outcome pretty quick as they have now been subpoenaed and will probably be found in contempt of court if they don’t do it now.
Not necessarily. The novel factor is the recording. NTSBs insistence on having it is a real risk to the pilots as opposed to the past practice (written notes).
No rational actor would agree to a recorded interview with Federal officials in an investigative capacity without immunity.
Because exact recordings are better than human memory.
The pilot will be subconsciously changing their own memories slightly to fit a better narrative. This is just what human memory does and you can't turn it off. These changes aren't particularly egregious unless you are consciously lying, but the legal definition of perjury does not care.
With written notes, those are going to be summarized in a way that adds doubt to any small discrepancies that might result from a pilot misremembering things. An exact recording makes it 100% clear that the pilot is doing that, which could be turned into a legal argument against them.
The point of an NTSB inquiry is full disclosure. It’s hard to do that on record with a Fed because some zealous prosecutor can twist statements into some sort of felony.
If you have to be subpoenaed, then you should also have to be license suspended until testimony provided. I'm all for having some sort of representation for the interview, but to refuse to cooperate unless legally forced to is beyond unfathomable.
I don't really give a damn about what they want. They are licensed pilots. Part of the requirements of being licensed means when accidents happen, you talk to people. If that talk is recorded, so be it. The recording works both ways. If the interviewer is being a dick and refusing to listen, then the recording will show that. If you're being combative and refusing to cooperate, then it will show that too. This argument falls flat with me regarding police body cams.
Hoping a note taker misses some salient detail in your favor is just trying to game the situation when you probably feel you're at fault. This isn't someone that committed a crime and is facing a judge/jury with possibility of going to jail. This is a licensed employee responsible for the safety of a not small number of other human beings. Some things stand to higher accountability
That’s not really accurate relative to the jurisprudence of the fifth amendment.
Generally, it’s held that you cannot be compelled to testify if there’s a reasonable likelihood that the response may tend to implicate someone. So you often can invoke 5A in civil contexts (which is why you’ll see people invoke it before Congress, or in civil trials).
One main difference is that in a criminal context we typically can’t draw an adverse inference against someone for invoking their fifth amendment rights. Whereas in a civil context we can. That doesn’t help us here much, though, because to my knowledge the NTSB is mostly interested in getting to the truth of the matter and not assigning liability or penalties.
One option to pierce 5A is to grant immunity for all testimony covered. So if the NTSB was pretty sure that the pilots aren’t going to be criminally charged for the incident (which they likely wouldn’t be), they could work with the DOJ to immunize the pilots for their testimony. That eliminates the risk of criminal prosecution for their responses, and nullifies the fifth amendment.
But I don't see the big deal here. This appears to be a situation where we have a clearly at fault party, the NTSB isn't going to provide any big insight.
The pilots are trying to avoid civil liability (and maybe criminal, and maybe keep their jobs, though it seems very likely they'll be fired), for some clear reasons. They aren't keeping secrets, they're just trying to avoid giving written testimony on something they'd want to take the fifth on later.
To wit: this is just "don't talk to the cops". Your insurance company will give you the same advice. No, it's not the best way to help an accident investigator, but it might save you some money.
I don't know how that is a surprise. That's what unions have almost always done. Especially if someone had seniority. Public Unions are even more egregious in this regards, just look at Police Unions.
The fact that police unions, or teachers unions, or pilots unions advocate for and defend their members shouldn't be a surprise. Everyone should be entitled to vigorous advocacy. The problem lies with who is vigorously advocating for the public and should they have better tools to do so. This is ultimately either an agency rule making issue, or legislative one.
Mentour Pilot and 74 Gear have shown me how impressively respectful the aviation industry is in regards to dealing with errors, and this union is doing exactly the opposite of it, trying to erode that trust.
The submission title is misleading; I'm not sure why the word "recorded" was dropped. The pilots have already been interviewed by the NTSB. The NTSB then asked for recorded interviews which, according to the pilot's association, has not been the standard.
I think this is a more nuanced position than most of the comments led me to believe. The pilot's association believes that "recording of interviews lead to less candid responses from those witnesses," which I think is a legitimate concern.
If the goal is safety, then the pilots need to feel comfortable being candid. If they feel that any wrong phrasing/word could be a legal liability they will behave accordingly.
"Based on everything we know so far, the fault for this lies squarely with the American pilots"
Do we? The discussion has VERY carefully avoided any discussion of what happened. Pinning the blame entirely on the pilots is what I'd do if I wanted to avoid pinning the blame on the controllers, or just wanted to write an anti-union screed.
I clicked on "about" and the author has absolutely no professional skills or qualifications related to the airline industry in any form at all, but his mind is certainly made up already about a "deep in the weeds" technical issue. I would rather hear the authors strongly held beliefs about K8S cluster design or ELK stack dashboards; its not like he's any less trained or qualified to hold those opinions.
The problem with this theory is that just a couple weeks later there was another near-miss incident (the one in Austin with the landing FedEx), where this time it was pretty clear that the controller was at fault. The most parsimonious explanation is that people are in fact pretty good at assigning blame and anti-union sentiment has nothing to do with it.
This article is prejudging the incident, and then criticizes the pilots over objecting to a detail that plausibly would be fuel for a prejudging Internet mob like this article is demonstrating.
I don't know whether audio recording is appropriate, but this article and some of the Internet pitchforks it's already prompting have shifted my initial kneejerk reaction to the headline... reminding me not to prejudge, nor to be so susceptible to Internet manipulation.
FWIW, aviation safety is party built upon encouraging a culture of professionalism, and sometimes involves confidentiality and protecting people who speak up about problems. For example, FAA/NASA ASRS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_Syst...
(Disclosure: I've done software work for aviation safety programs.)
It’s news article titles like “Reckless American 777 Pilots Refuse Recorded NTSB Interviews” that fuel this sort of pushback that the pilots are giving about interviews.
My knee-jerk reaction is "they should be recorded" so I write this to attempt to steel-man the alternative.
A core concept of safety is arriving at a root cause in an effort to continuously improve. This won't happen in an adversarial fact finding as the interests of the participants diverge instead of converge. Two key concepts here are Psychological Safety and Just Culture.
What could be adversarial about just recording the interview? While NTSB's argument for recording interviews is facially sound, it represents a change from previous practice. Further, it represents opening a collaborative and open fact-finding conversation to third parties who have adversarial interests. Key concepts here are "Don't talk to cops" [2] and Nothing to Hide [3]
It is ironic that the NTSB's interest in recording is in part driven by a lack of data caused by no-one at the airport pulling the Andon cord [4] at the time of the near miss. The cockpit voice recorders only record two hours. Since the flight continued to take off and flew for more than 2 hours, the voice data was lost. The NTSB seeks to record for "highest degree of accuracy, completeness, and efficiency" the pilots many days after the event based on their memory as a witness of themselves [4].
I would probably do the same and if I was a lawyer I would probably advise it too. They have already ended their careers, there is nothing to be gained for them from being questioned. And the less videos the better for whatever they will be trying to do in their future careers. Let the justice run its course.
> Is their refusal to be interviewed illegal? No, not as of now. Is it unethical? Absolutely, in my opinion.
Except nobody who means anything in this case cares about your opinion. Neither the pilots nor the judge who will take the case. Ethical or unethical in your opinion, any person in so much trouble has right to make decisions to defend themselves. If you believe in Constitution you have to believe in peoples' right to not incriminate themselves and you have to believe it is not unethical to use what Constitution affords to everybody.
It seems a bit much to assume the union believed that saying "no thanks" meant the NTSB would run away with their tail between their legs after a serious incident.
The outcome of this legal wrangling will be an impartial judicial system recording will be made instead of the pilots being recorded by a hostile party. I'm really not seeing a problem with dispensing justice based on impartiality, or with justice being "blind".
After seeing some of the work the NTSB has done over the years, I've grown to respect them.
Their job has collectively saved a huge number of lives. Flying is measurably safer because of them, not just in the US but world-wide. We know so much more about flight and flight safety because of it.
Refusing to be interviewed with them, and their union interfering feels very slimy. Pilots are responsible for all the lives on board, and they need to be held accountable when they make a mistake - even if it doesn't end in a loss of life.
The fact that the cockpit voice recorder only stores 2 hours of data is crazy to me.
Having long recordings is most important in cases where the plane doesn’t crash - if it crashes, the CVR will stop recording anyway.
So perhaps airlines should introduce a secondary CVR, that records for much longer, but isn’t as resilient? There’s plenty of cheap, consumer-grade equipment that would do the job fine.
I’m glad the NTSB are showing some interest at least. It’s a problem that I’ve seen come up time again and again when looking into non-hull-loss incidents.
There’s a simple reason for them not interviewing. No upside for the pilots, and the information could be used against them.
I find myself agreeing with the union’s reasoning. There’s no justification for recorded audio. Stenographers are fine for all legal applications of authoritative transcripts.
If the air traffic controllers still had a real union they’d be doing the same thing.
Am I the only one to note that recorded interviews are a new procedure, cited in the article?
I don't know how pilot investigations are conducted, but in less critical fields a simple investigation with a bias against particular parties can quickly turn into "here is some recorded evidence that.. " then the court can charge someone which tends to appease the desire to dig further. Not saying that's what is going on i have no clue, but let's consider those pilots are doing something perfectly legal and the fact it is legal is a stronger judgment basis than some article making it sound like public safety is being neglected by rogue pilots.
The NTSB is a government agency representing the government. You should never talk to these agencies unless forced to. There is zero upside for you and lots of downside.
This is the type of BS that leads people to hate unions.
In a very narrow sense, it is good strategy to object to anything that isn't included in the current negotiated contract, and to demand "concessions" for adding things.
But when that stretches to "airplane pilots union actively hinders investigation into near-crash", the public shouldn't support the union.
This mindset is just good conditioning by anti-union elements. The pilots union advocates for the pilots, that's not a surprise, everyone should be entitled to good advocacy and process done by the book. The public's interests will (or should be[1]) well represented by the NTSB, that is how these processes work, the pilots union does not need to do NTSBs work for them. Accountability should absolutely be a thing, but it should not be ad hoc subject to the whims of public opinion, it should follow process.
This is not an opinion on the merits of what the pilots did or did not do, that will ultimately be determined by the investigation.
[1]: If the public's interests are not vigorously, well represented by the NTSB that is either an agency rule making issue or a legislative one, however in this case the NTSB has subpoena power so they have the tools they need to move this along as they should.
Court Reporters do not need an audio recording to produce an accurate transcript. Their certification requires them to be able to track 4 voices simultaneously at a certain word per minute rate into their Stenograph. I do not find the pilot’s request unreasonable and the NTSB can have the interview if they drop their unnecessary requirement.
If there was a risk of bias in some form of recording I could understand it, but the whole point of the audio recording is accuracy. What's confusing is the grounds for refusing - "they haven't done it before" seems a pretty weak basis. The only thing I could think of was that they're worried about the audio leaking, but then why not say that?
But bottom line, the pilots are holding all the cards because there is no legal basis to require a recording. If the NTSB wants an interview, their only choice is to ditch the recordings. One can draw their own conclusions about why the NTSB is choosing not to interview instead.
> The reason interviews are so important is because there’s no cockpit voice recorder (CVR) of the incident, as that only records for two hours, and is then overwritten; since the pilots continued flying to London, this critical evidence isn’t available to investigators
JFC. How are they allowed to have such useless technology for something so important?
My guess is that these rules are so old that it would have been a technological burden to keep longer recordings at the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are using a tape recorder on a loop.
In other words, the union seems to be looking out for its members at the expense of everyone's safety.