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Re: LA Times story on Metrolink vs BNSF incident at Rialto [link]
Author: Dr Zarkoff
Date: 11-23-2008 - 01:53
> By the same token, it's hard for me to imagine
> that two people who not only saw the signal
> indications but must have been -- or certainly
> should have been -- visually aware of the BNSF
> train just got that way all of a sudden on a
> clear, sunny day. Somebody should have seen some
> kind of warning sign.
>One would think so, wouldn't one.
At this point, refer to the Tenerife disaster. Consensus is that the fault lay with the Lufthansa pilot. He was the most senior pilot in Lufthansa and was in a hurry to get home. As Mel Brooks said to Harvey Korman, "You don't correct the King", a comedic but true statement of the natural human tendency to defer to senior persons. There were indications that the Lufthansa co-pilot or navigator knew something was wrong but out of this innate human trait "didn't correct the King". So "One would think so, wouldn't one." would be more correct if stated "One would hope so, wouldn't one." because it takes a bit of training to drum up the courage to correct your superiors. I suspect the second set of eyes wasn't experienced enough (the warm body in a slot mentality which is so rife with operations these days) and couldn't conceive of yelling at the engineer to "STOP this f**king train RIGHT NOW."
> that two people who not only saw the signal
> indications but must have been -- or certainly
> should have been -- visually aware of the BNSF
> train just got that way all of a sudden on a
> clear, sunny day. Somebody should have seen some
> kind of warning sign.
>One would think so, wouldn't one.
At this point, refer to the Tenerife disaster. Consensus is that the fault lay with the Lufthansa pilot. He was the most senior pilot in Lufthansa and was in a hurry to get home. As Mel Brooks said to Harvey Korman, "You don't correct the King", a comedic but true statement of the natural human tendency to defer to senior persons. There were indications that the Lufthansa co-pilot or navigator knew something was wrong but out of this innate human trait "didn't correct the King". So "One would think so, wouldn't one." would be more correct if stated "One would hope so, wouldn't one." because it takes a bit of training to drum up the courage to correct your superiors. I suspect the second set of eyes wasn't experienced enough (the warm body in a slot mentality which is so rife with operations these days) and couldn't conceive of yelling at the engineer to "STOP this f**king train RIGHT NOW."
