I think there's a fascination in the amount of hardware and software engineering that goes into making a bunch of metal tubes and curves that weight 100,000+ lbs able to fly at 30,000 ft for hours. And we get very upset/interested when these things fail.
Likely because there was no casualty, which doesn't really make headlines.
On the other hand, the concentration of people who are interested in planes/flights are definitely higher on HN than something as generic as Google news
HN has a particular fascination with aviation disasters. No disrespect at all, I've learnt more about aviation here than anywhere else. Before I came here I just assumed the whole thing to be magic.
> HN has a particular fascination with aviation disasters.
HN has a fascination with Boeing's incompetency, greed and corner cutting that resulted in lost lives. That evolved tangentially into an interest in aviation incidents and accidents.
I really think that's some reverse causality here (source: been here since at least 2012, eyeing my account registration date). The Boeing thing is of recent years but commercial airline crashes have always been interesting to many people from my perception
Just wanted to point out that Boeing's various disasters are not due to greed but to the combination of stupidity and greed.
When smart people get greedy, they build things that last and that they can be proud of, because that's what's best for them long term.
Whereas when smart people have zero greed, they build nothing at all. You need a strong motivation to power you through the pain of creating something good.
Is it? Many greedy people seem to happily fail upwards (or sideways to different companies). The baseline for compensation is generally what your previous compensation was, not the long-term success of your creations.
The interest doesn’t come from wanting to see random destruction like rubberneckers do. Commercial passenger aviation is as safe as it gets and incidents require multiple things to go wrong.
An aviation disaster is a fascinating thing because it pushes forward safety protocols or engineering safeguards.
There is nothing interesting about a car that smashes into a guardrail, which is what rubberneckers are into.
An other aspect of aviation disasters that is much more interesting than other disasters is that aviation has had a long history of using a different approach when it comes to investigation and human factors. Even the language we use, like "pilot error" is deeply connected to aviation disaster history, which get applied in many more areas than just aviation.
What to Submit: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I feel like major airline crashes are usually headlines.