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Final report on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in-flight exit door plug separation

(www.ntsb.gov:443)
165 points starkparker | 2 comments | 10 Jul 25 20:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.419s | source
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thomascountz ◴[10 Jul 25 21:46 UTC] No.44525985[source]▶
> We determined that the probable cause of this accident was the in-flight separation of the left MED plug due to Boeing’s failure to provide adequate training, guidance, and oversight necessary to ensure that manufacturing personnel could consistently and correctly comply with its parts removal process, which was intended to document and ensure that the securing bolts and hardware that were removed to facilitate rework during the manufacturing process were properly reinstalled.

A bit OT, but what a gorgeous whale of a sentence! As always, the literary prowess of NTSB writers does not disappoint.

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0rzech ◴[10 Jul 25 22:10 UTC] No.44526228[source]▶
At school (Polish class in Poland) we were always taught to prefer complex and compound sentences over simple ones, because it's more elegant and speaks well the speaker/writer.
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1. Telemakhos ◴[10 Jul 25 22:36 UTC] No.44526455[source]▶
This sentence isn't written for elegance but for meaning. The formal cause of the accident was the mechanical separation, but that happened for a reason, either mechanical failure (which means a failure in the engineering of the aircraft, which would have to be remedied by new engineering processes) or an assembly failure (which would have to be remedied by new assembly processes). In one sentence, the author drills down to exactly what went wrong that enabled the accident to happen. Identifying that is the first step to remedying it.
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2. 0rzech ◴[11 Jul 25 08:07 UTC] No.44529519[source]▶
You could write the same thing using multiple sentences no problem, without affecting the meaning.