> 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.

> That evolved tangentially into

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

You can see it in CGPGrey's long defunct Hello Internet podcast. He talked about aviation disasters often and name dropped hacker news a few times.

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.

> because that's what's best for them long term

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 people in charge could have made billions more if they held stock for the rest of their lives in a successful company that they helped build.

A long term success is a safer bet, a bigger payout, less stressful, and something to be proud of on your deathbed.

Compare causing and then jumping from one shipwreck to another like a stressed out little rat.

A smart person who wants a great life will choose a long-term orientation.

Sounds like Hammerstein's classification of soldiers, the stupid/smart/lazy/industrious matrix.

As a software focused community, it's interesting to see how engineering is done it safety critical industries.

And accident investigation! Wish such detailed analysis was done in other fields.

Why would that be "disrespectful"?

It could be read as calling people here rubberneckers, which is not exactly a compliment

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.