Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
@cmdahler: Why so defensive? I never said either you or pilots are complete idiots, though in your case, I'm beginning to wonder.
And the story you quote just goes to show that when the plane manufacturer actually performed tests, they found nothing.
All I'm asking for is to have more of such tests and have their results published so that an informed decision can be made, based on *gasp* actual experiments that *gasp* allow us to reach a *gasp* informed decision.
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I was responding to the arrogance and condescension that implied that the pilots of this particular flight had a simple autopilot problem, saw a guy using a laptop in the cabin, and leapt to the conclusion the laptop had caused the problem without doing even something as simple as asking him to turn it off and then back on again to see if the problem was reproducible. If that was not your intent, then you have my apologies.
The flight crew did in fact perform such a test and were able to reproduce the problem multiple times. Their conclusion that the laptop was causing the problem thus had a scientific basis. This particular incident led the FAA to a great deal of concern
because Boeing could not reproduce the problem even after lengthy testing. The FAA did not leap to the conclusion that the pilots on this flight had no scientific methodology to back up their assertion but rather accepted their version of the event and the informal testing they performed on the spot as sound and valid input. Given that you accept the original version of events as sound, any responsible scientific conclusion would include at least the
possibility that the failure to reproduce the problem through subsequent testing could be due to some unknown condition that Boeing didn't accurately mimic. That possibility is what gives the FAA headaches.