My Letter to the Editor of New York Times Magazine
Langewiesche is a terrific writer, but it does seem like the overwhelming majority of people in the business consider his take on the 737MAX to be misguided.<p>Reading his article, I got the impression that he has a certain idealised image of what a pilot should be like. One that I have also noticed quite a few people here on HN seem to be rather fond of.<p>Namely: that being a pilot should not just be someone&#x27;s job, but their calling. To use a weird phrase I once saw here, they are supposed to be &quot;fixed-wing enthusiasts&quot;.<p>There also seems to be a certain, somewhat outdated, concept of masculinity at play here. And, of course, combining these expectations with stereotypes of African and Asian companies (and people) initially led many to the conclusion that these pilots were either incompetent (&quot;because of a lack of calories in early childhood&quot; to quote one line of reasoning I saw (luckily not here)) or incapable of independent thinking. Never mind that at least one of the captains was trained in the US.<p>These ideas couldn&#x27;t be farther from how the system is actually evolving, and how it should be: Flying <i>needs to be boring</i>. If your pilot has a chance to become a hero, the system has already failed. The goal must be a system of technology, institutions, curricula, etc. that makes it perfectly safe to trust any decent high school student to become a competent(-enough) pilot. Candidates with a sense for adventure should be screened out, because flying an airliner is dreadfully boring, and a volatile personality will soon find a way to make it more exciting (drinking, usually).<p>And planes should become more and more automated. Software and design errors tend to occur just once. Humans tend to make mistakes, even repeatedly, even with the best training. The 737MAX disaster is a terrible outlier that shouldn&#x27;t obfuscate the fact that in the last 50 years or  so, airline fatalities have dropped by an order of magnitude, even thought miles traveled have increased by a similar magnitude.<p>Combining the two: air travel today is 50 to 100x safer than it was in the golden age of piloting so many seem to glorify.