It seems to me this is a disaster they'd cover on TV news (thus off-topic) and it doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity (thus not on-topic). Little different than a jackknifed semi on the highway that a lot of HN members probably use.
Now a technical analysis of the factors leading to the crash would very much be intellectually gratifying and I look forward to seeing that posted on HN.
SFO is the nearest airport to San Francisco and Palo Alto, I expect this will affect travel for people of startups coming back from vacation like myself. That's why.
It's relevant because in terms of safety, commercial aviation equipment (aka "planes") are some of the most throughly engineered pieces of technology. 90% of the engineering lessons software engineering is learning today was learned in aviation decades ago.
Now, one of the things just did something it not only wasn't supposed to do, it did something that shouldn't even be possible. That is very interesting news to hackers.
How about: because the 777 is one of the newest airliners in production and SFO is one of the busiest airports in the US, so if this is due to an engineering defect it's both extremely concerning and relevant to general HN discussion, even aside from the immediate personal safety aspect. Just as the 787 battery problems were.
The aircraft in question is a 777-200ER, which first flew in 1996.
The variants are usually relatively minor updates, though. Even the 747, which first flew in 1969, has a variant that can be considered "new" (-8, first flew in 2005). It's usually the early variants that validate the design.
Relative to other comparable aircraft, the 777 has a remarkably clean accident/incident record over an operational history spanning nearly 20 years.
Ah -- I was copying from the airliners.net thread where someone initially said it was a 777-200LR. It is amazing just how safe the 777 seems to be. I wish they'd done the KC-777 plan for tankers instead of a KC-767.
This is HN relevant because it is SF airport but also because when a story is breaking its pretty cool to watch people gather the information and report it, especially HN'ers. Helps give our community a personality. Stories like these don't stay at the top for very long, but while its breaking news I feel like HN has a unique way of reporting and that makes it HN relevant.
You've been downvoted, but I think your question is a right one. Is this relevant, because it happened in San Francisco? Is every incident or crash in San Francisco relevant, then?
Does it satisfy our intellectual curiosity? Is there something we can learn from it? Is there a clever hack involved? An interesting trend emerging?
Obviously 128 people (what a nice number) think this should be on the HN front page. I don't.
Please get off of your high horse and have decency or respect for human lives. Also, there are always stories of prominent hackers dying on HN and we give our condolences as well as discuss the innovations of that hacker. But because it's live and people seem ok, it's not relevant?
Also, if you can't learn something or satisfy your intellectual curiosity from an extremely violent plane crash that left (what is seems to be) all of the passengers virtually unscathed, you're really not trying. There are tons of physics and engineering principles in place in the flight of a plane and, imo, looking at the way the tail was lost, it should have turned out way worse than it did. Anyways, there's a flag button on the article, so feel free to press that button and move on. Thank you.
