American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died
simpleflying.com364 points by NaOH 3 days ago
364 points by NaOH 3 days ago
I worked at the AA maintenance base in Tulsa and retired after thirty years. Although I worked in the power plant and was not an A&P mechanic, over the years I had the pleasure of working around some of the thousands of plane mechanics employed on the base. I even had an ex brother-in-law who was a dock crew chief on one of the 737 lines.
I was always impressed by how seriously they took their jobs and how they were quick to tell anyone that they knew people's live could be at stake. The complexity of the work made experienced and long career hands absolutely necessary. The gravity of the job always weighs heavy on new hires and the help they received can't be measured. The online and classroom training that all receive during the length of their careers is extensive.
In all the many different trades at the base, two jokes were always told and I guarantee they're still being told today: Classroom training taught me how to drink coffee. And they wouldn't fly on AA because they knew the guys who worked on the planes. (The first one is absolutely true. The second was is not, especially after the company started flying to New Zealand!)
Al: middle class, unassuming, regular joe.
Azriel: All mighty servant of Yahweh. He who cleaves soul from body, angel of death. Archangel.
A buddy of mine is the son of a United Airlines mechanic who was fairly high up in the organization. When his dad passed United gave him a stack of blank wax tickets. His son could write the destination on them and fly for free. Near the end of the stack they were largely ornamental as he could just tell them where he wanted to go and they would print a proper ticket. But still, it was a rather classy way to honor his father.
I haven't heard the term before. What's a 'wax ticket'?
It’s WYO (write your own) not wax. I’m guessing the GP was on their phone and it autocorrected the word.
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/afacwa/pages/687/attac... (page 318)
Wow, I was already imagining a type of ticket printed on some kind of wax paper where one could easily write permanently onto it. Disappointing to hear it was a typo.
It refers to exactly what they describe: A blank, open-ended ticket you can fill in by hand.
It's translucent slab of pale honey-scented wax whose faint, imprinted digits will distort if you press them too firmly. Also keep away from even moderate heat.
It's a decorated envelope, you write the destination on a clean sheet of paper then wax seal it with the company-issued signet ring.
That is certainly not what it describes.
The literal next sentence is 'His son could write the destination on them and fly for free'. That was added to be a description of what a 'wax ticket' is
I didn't know wax was used as a medium anywhere today. Isn't it heavy and hard to write on?
If you're interested in commercial aircraft and their maintenance process, check out Stig Shift on YouTube. He's another AA mechanic based in LAX, and makes interesting videos with some technical deep dives interspersed with planespotting.
Azriel "Al" Blackman
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/29/us/azriel-al-blackman-dea... | https://archive.today/dmcaA
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/105781-lo...
How many apprentices did this guy managed to put through the pipeline before his career was over? It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen. They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every single time.
I work in a mid sized engineering organization, and the older engineers (and engineer-adjacent people like me) mentor the younger ones all the time.
One thing that can't be codified in procedures is what I call "situational awareness" for lack of a better term. I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable. In my organization, the older engineers have a sixth sense for projects that are going to be cancelled.
There's a reason why older drivers (up to a point of course) pay less for car insurance, yet the rules are the same for all of us.
> I don't think you can learn how to work in a machine shop safely from a book. Or recognize when a complex design is heading towards being unworkable.
This strikes me as something one learns very slowly over time. Safety takes time to internalize after close calls or seeing people get hurt. Same with complexity, it takes going through project after project to get a gut feeling for what works and what doesn't.
Parents also develop the ability to see several seconds into the future with regard to their toddlers and small children.
Right! Maybe the longer into the future the older the kid is. It's hard to predict past 1s sometimes what my toddler is going to do. The older one, I'd bet on the outcome within a couple seconds.
The nightmare of every machinist: salespeople and customers visiting the floor.
It’s because miles driven decreases with age not because old people drive safer.
After accounting for miles driven, fatal crash rates start increasing around age 70, peaking at 85+ near a level equal to the rate of 16-19 year old drivers, based on a preliminary skimming of the data I could find.
Based on anecdotal evidence and experience, I absolutely believe that. Just a few weeks ago near me an elderly driver caused a crash that killed herself and a passenger in another car when she failed to follow a curve and drove head-on into opposing traffic on a road with a 40MPH speed limit.
> unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears
Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a 777 doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated and republished to all maintenance crews worldwide.
There is a famous story about how an F16 got grounded because an half inch metal pin was missing from the cockpit canopy. Nobody knew what the pin did or if it was even necessary but you can't fly a plan that 'missing a part'. After several days of being grounded they finally reached out to a guy who had retired 20 years ago who told them the pin was a part of a analogue sensor that had been replaced nearly 30 years ago. Only the pin remained as a vestigial organ since it was part of the airframe design.
It doesn't matter how well you document things there will always be tribal / personal knowledge.
Even if stuff is written down you have to know where to look.
I babysat for a military fighter jet mechanic when I was young, he said when they dismantled and rebuilt planes there was a drawer for all the spare parts that were left over.
Rap's Law of Inanimate Reproduction[1] strikes again!
[1]: "If you take something apart and put it back together again enough times, eventually you have two if it."
> but you can't fly a plan that 'missing a part'
It’s a great story, but I assure you there is a pretty high percentage of airplanes flying with missing parts and systems placarded as INOP in both military and civilian aviation.
Before you can placard something as INOP, you must determine whether the manufacturer and certifying authority have included that part in the Minimum Equipment List or Dispatch Deviation List. Mechanics do both get to determine this at their own discretion. Hence the call to the manufacturer for clarification on the necessity of said pin.
To reiterate, you CANNOT fly an airplane with an undocumented missing part. If the part is documented in the logbook as removed, and it is acceptable to fly that way, then it is not missing.
I have been building and maintaining commercial aircraft for a living for 30 years. What is your experience?
Thanks for asking for my credentials, even though you don’t seem to disagree that lots of aircraft are dispatched with imperfections, so many in fact that there’s a defined process and CFRs to cover it.
Because you asked, I’ve been flying, owning, and overseeing the maintenance of our aircraft for 27 years, including understanding my freedoms and obligations as a pilot and as an operator with regards to the legality of dispatch for imperfect aircraft under both normal operations and under special flight (aka “ferry”) permits. I have spent a lot of time across those three decades both socially and in continuing education courses/seminars with both GA and commercial flight crews and A&P/IAs.
Okay, but did you win the Putnam?
I don't think you guys are really disagreeing with each other. Just that one is using a colloquial definition of "missing" and the other, a technical one.
The 'forest for the tree' here is that when it comes to general operations, a crew chief doesnt generally have the authority to signoff a bird as flight-ready for an unaccounted component. That is the authority of a PMO or a Risk Officer or someone else in flightoos, not a frontline maintenance call. Maybe someone in a maintainence squadron?
An absent (removed) part might be acceptable depending on circumstances, but a genuinely missing part creates hazards and must be ascertained as to its location. A mechanical jam, an electric short, a hydraulic leak, or a Foreign Object Damage to the engine from a piece of metal on the loose can destroy the plane, endanger people and mission. Same concern with tools & bits, can't have any unaccounted for.
I remember touring the assembly line for military jets.
There were posters everywhere about "extra parts" they called FOD.
FOD applies more broadly than that, as well. Candy wrappers on the runway is also FOD.
It stands for foreign object debris, and means any physical thing out of place where it may cause damage or injury. Because of the nature of jet engines, basically anything can be FOD depending on where you put it.
Chesterton's fence is strong with this one
Exactly. Framing completely changes this from an absurd story causing pointless grounding due to loss of institutional knowledge, to an example of good judgement (or protocol) in the absence of knowledge and acknowledgement of the risk of unknown consequences.
What's being ignored is the 1/100 of these stories where this judgement pays off, saves aircraft and lives that make the other 99 worth while.
> Even if stuff is written down you have to know where to look.
That's one of the things I love about AI: It's excellent at figuring out where to look, because it can digest so many documents so much faster than a person.
For all our sakes, I hope your career never takes you anywhere near an airport.
Yeah it’s great to point an AI at a very detailed and specific engineering manual and have it distilled down into bullet points. There’s certainly no room for information loss in that plan! /s
Plus everything important is always written down.
It’s more true in aviation than anywhere else (except maybe space flight), but still.
And if it's written down, it's accurate. 100. Percent. Accurate. /s
You know, if I had to make that bet, I would choose airline maintenance manuals as the test case.
And because it's accurate the AI will know how to weigh that accurate information against other accurate information in such a way that it will give you a great answer without any help. In other words: any amateur will be able to do aircraft maintenance! What can go wrong? /s
I hate AI as much as anybody, but claiming that it's not useful for "distilling volumes of data into a short list of places to look first" is silly.
A former employer owned a combined cycle power plant -when they were having issues (not huge ones, but weird issues or gauge readings) they’d call this old timer and he’d come in walking around ask the operators to make some settings changes and be listening the whole time. And he’d come back and be like “hey the second stage compressor is out of balance” there were all sorts of telematics and manuals, but he could tell what was wrong just by listening…that was invaluable
The diagnostic/service steps you have to write to preclude any requirement of skill/experience make it stupid proof waste a lot of labor in the process. Cheaper to have the guy with the skill/experience show up and listen to the thing.
Well ... It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London: https://thetaxi.academy/
It takes also many years of study before they will let you touch any living person with your scalpel, and then many years of apprenticeship with actual surgeons when you do touch people with your tools.
I can imagine maintaining a big jumbo jet also requires some specialized practical knowledge you cannot acquire just by reading books and looking at nice little videos.
The problem is not to explain things when everything works perfectly. The problem is getting the ability to diagnose the root causes of defects using all your senses and your intuition. That is not taught in books.
> It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London
I’ve only been to London once, for work. One of the coolest things I did when I was there was to take a black London cab from the financial district to Heathrow when I was leaving. It was probably a 30 minute drive. The driver had been driving a cab since 1982. He told me all about the requirements and training for being a cab driver and a bunch of other things that I did not know (for example, they own the cars, and they can choose when they work). He was also a wealth of information about London, as you can imagine, and pointed out lots of interesting things as we drove.
It was probably a $50 cab ride, but worth every penny (even though it wasn’t my money since it was a work trip).
> It takes four years of education before becoming a taxi driver in London
That doesn't apply to private hire vehicle drivers afaik.
Private hire is technically not a taxi. They can't pick someone up at a rank or on the street.
Or Uber drivers in London
(In case you're not aware) It's the same thing. Uber operates in London as private hire operator, so their drivers are mini cab drivers. Same rules (now: basic English and rules test, yearly car inspections, MOT every 6 months, cars must have TFL badges, etc).
There are detailed step-by-step instruction cards (task cards) for every single maintenance operation on an airplane. Nobody is reinventing the wheel, they’re carefully following predetermined procedures. Someone has to figure out which maintenance procedures need to happen, but the work itself is laid out for you step by step.
Cool! I did not know that.
Augmented reality glasses, coupled with an AI that can interpret vision would seem to be useful here then.
This seems like a fast-track to making airline mechanics a minimum-wage, any-guy-off-the-street kind of job, which is not who I want touching the plane I'm flying in.
There needs to be SOME accountability. "Oh, but my glasses told me to unscrew this bolt, I was just following orders." is not how I want the future to be.
I’ve had the same thought re: AR glasses with a HUD for mechanics/construction workers, there are a lot of cool possibilities.
We worked on a proof of concept using HoloLens for an engine teardown team at a trucking OEM. Ran into issues around network, security, the Hololens itself and a general disinterest from the teardown team but there's a lot of room to run in this space. It was a fun, if frustrating, project.
Yeah ... then you can have basically anyone off the street do the job. A great opportunity to pay your jumbo jet mechanics less than taxi drivers.
I guess it would explain those small insignificant issues, however:
https://viewfromthewing.com/ntsb-report-confirms-the-unravel...
“Not to be negative about experts here, but of all industries, isn’t software development one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all? I would hope that someone maintaining a web service doesn’t have to remember certain tricks or tips outside of what the manuals say, and when mistakes are found, they’d be noted, investigated and republished to all developers worldwide.”
Just making a point that everyone else’s job always seems simple from the outside.
Just read and internalize the 800k page manual, some of which poorly explains why things are the way they are or is outright wrong.
Ezpz
The joke about software developers refusing to enter an airplane running their own code dates back at least 30 years.
Software engineering is unique in STEM in that it has nearly zero regulations. Nobody keeps anybody accountable for quality and there are never any legal consequences. No other STEM jobs is like that, usually there are thousand hoops to jump through to do anything non-standard, but in software there's nothing. You can literally go to prison for forging an aircraft maintenance log, but you can forge JIRA logs to your heart's content and never get prosecuted (at most your employer can sue you for damages but that's it).
That's not a valid comparison.
A Jira log is not part of a Quality Management System (QMS). An aircraft maintenance log is. If you fake data in the QMS, software or not, for a regulated industry, I can assure you that it won't be taken lightly by the regulators.
Try forging the software validation test records for that airplane's flight control system and see what happens.
My point is exactly that there's no such thing as legally required quality management system for software. And that's what makes software development uniquely shitty in terms of not having documentation or following written instructions, to a degree unseen in any other STEM discipline. Trying to explain lack of knowledge transfer in aviation industry by putting it in terms of software industry was the worst possible analogy out of all analogies that could conceivably be made on this subject.
Forging software validation records isn't illegal because you're forging documents regarding software, but because you're forging documents regarding an airplane. Nobody gives a flying fuck about forged records for software that isn't installed on any airplane. It's not the act of forging that's illegal, but the act of installing forged software on a real airplane. Unlike the airplane repair records, where forgery is a crime in and of itself even if the airplane never flies.
I've worked with a number of clients that have lost senior engineers due to old age or retirement, and the impact is often very significant regardless of how sophisticated their knowledge management infrastructure is. Documentation can not fully replace the insight and situational awareness many of these experts posses and most of the time knowledge management still suffers from the 'not knowing what you don't know' issue. Only well structured 'apprenticeship' programs come close. I know some are going to point to AI, but I've worked in AI for over 2 decades and have extensive experience in Expert Systems and Knowledge Engineering from early in my career. It is not a complete solution. Given today's technology its trivial to replicate 'text book knowledge' but the difficult, expensive problems occur in the margins and its still hard to train AI on open ended / rare occurrences outside of domains that have specific advantages like software engineering. Talented and experienced people are still required. Maybe that will change soon, but AI isn't there yet.
The mistake of modernity is believing that all tacit knowledge can be reduced to words.
I implore everyone to take on a nut and bolts (or resistors and transistors) hardware project sometime in their life to learn what it's like working on "Mother Nature OS".
I guess a more relatable way of conveying this is that you can have the recipe from a michelin star chef, but you're still not going to get anywhere close to michelin star quality.
heh the first time i took on a project as a new homeowner (building a deck) i learned this lesson. I spec'd everything out on paper and covered all the bases and felt pretty confident. Then I purchased the wood and so many pieces weren't the size advertised and i don't mean how a 2x4 is not really 2 inches by 4 inches. Some pieces were 3/4" too short, others too long, some straight but most weren't. It took so many trips to/from home depot and went over budget and wayyy over time.
oh and post holes, some are easy and some you hit mystery chunks of concrete(!?). It was like archaeological expedition trying to get deep enough holes in the ground.
I had a co-worker who was an experienced software developer but had never worked on a system that interfaced with the physical world before.
For quite a while, he hated having to test on real hardware because all sorts of failure modes that he couldn't predict: belts stretching, mechanisms hitting each other or not lining up properly and losing position, etc. kept happening and interfering with his nice "this will only take 15 minutes to test" estimates, making it an all-afternoon affair.
OTOH, it was that unpredictability and having to deal with weird stuff that I liked about programming embedded systems.
> isn’t airline maintenance one of the most documented and standard procedure focused of them all
I hope you're right :) You probably are too. But even with that, there is a reason it's a profession and not something we ask gig-workers to do, it takes expertise and skill like any other skilled work, even though all the literal actions one might take is technically written down somewhere. Even in such industries, experts would get "hunches" about what is wrong, and are able to quicker pinpoint issues, and similar things. Or "getting a bad feeling" before something is actually evidentially bad, which prevented human disaster more than once in history.
I think if you consider that the job couldn't be done by just anybody who can read and follow instructions, then it might not be as easy as just "follow what the manuals say" and in those cases expertise, knowledge and experience matters a great deal.
Sure, but you are always going to get the "thing makes a strange noise but it isn't doing it now" ticket and there isn't going to be a "occasional strange noise" checklist.
It's sad but at the same time there is a sort of optimization that tends to occur each time the magic trick is rediscovered.
Often it is not possible to separate the technique from the man. Things like riding a bike or flying a helicopter come to mind. A lot of what makes a master good cannot be written down anywhere. There isn't anything tangible to actually lose.
How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently? You could explain the principles and general ideas, but the apprentice is going to need to get scraped up a bit before they actually learn anything that matters. The apprentice willing to suffer repeated failure is where most of the heavy lifting occurs. The master is mostly a backstop to keep the apprentice alive.
You speak of tacit knowledge[1]
Worse is that they who have the knowledge don't realise that others don't know what they know, it's completely automatic and ingrained to the owner.
There's nothing implied about tacit knowledge being knowledge that you don't know others don't have. For instance in chess mastery, one is fully aware that you simply see the board in a different way. It's not like you're aloof of your own 'advantage', but then in lessons you work to gradually, step by step, instill such in the student. Some of the most successful teachers are those who themselves learned the game a bit later than average, enabling them to draw more heavily on their own path. For instance Mark Dvoretsky only earned the IM title when he was 28!
28? You make it sound like he was 90!
haha, well his methods, that live on after he's gone, are a big part of the reason people are now making GM at 12.
It's unclear whether these sort of players will do as good a job at handing down their knowledge though. Think about how little you remember, in much detail at least, about stuff before you were 12 - and now imagine you were already master strength by then, let alone a grandmaster. I'm a later starter and can still vividly remember when I barely knew how the pieces moved, and I think that gives me a huge edge over most players in terms of teaching.
I think they're touching on multiple things that typically happens between an apprentice and master, not just tacit knowledge. Also implicit learning, procedural / nondeclarative memory, expert intuition and metacognitive feelings, all very hard to quantify into a written document, but put two people together where one learns from the other, and all these somehow gets transferred over time.
> How would you write a document that describes to someone how to ride a bike or dig holes efficiently?
You don't. You put these people together for some years to work on stuff together, and a small percentage of this "intangible" feelings, knowledge and experiences you cannot write down somehow magically passes over to the other person.
Of course, the apprentice will still require their own repeated failures and uphill battle even getting close, but having someone who mastered the craft near you as you go through this, makes the whole process a hell of a lot faster.
It is interesting that you picked "riding a bike". If anything, there has been a generation leap in how fast children can learn to ride a bike. Get them started on a Strider bike with no pedals. Once the child is large enough to ride a bike, they can teach themselves in about one or two days. (Numerous parents in the 2020s have confirmed this pattern to me.) Something about the Strider bike teaches them a lot about how to ride a (pedal) bike when the day arrives. When I grew up, I didn't have a Strider bike (I'm not sure they existed where I lived). Learning to ride a bike was tough and took a lot of practice with my father.
This is why I do not fear the ALI/LLMs will take over everything about Software Engineering anytime soon, if ever.
The amount of tacit knowledge I am applying to the architecture of my projects is probably too deep for LLMs to even approach, IMO. It takes very little to have Opus or even Fable make a mess that is obviously bad to anyone who understand even the first thing about effective software architecture.
That's why this is speaking about apprentice and not about lectures in an university.
You don't need to write it down to pass the knowledge down to an apprentice.
Your bicycle case is a great example. People don't learn to ride a bike from a book. They receive in-person instruction of exactly the type the comment you're responding to was writing about.
One interesting thing about riding a bike is that to turn right, you must initially turn the handlebars to the left (called countersteering). This is subconscious, not explicitly taught and virtually everyone disbelieves this at first when told. But it's something that needs to "click" in order to ride a bike. It's the reason it is so hard to ride a carnival trick bike with a gear added to reverse the handlebar/steering relationship; you don't consciously know how to change your input. There's even some videos by bike youtubers that learn to ride a bike with reverse steering, including the subconscious countersteering part. When they switch back to a normal bike, it once again takes time to relearn.
To relate this back to the comment thread, people don't even always know the full extent of what they have learned.
The blurb here might be of interest to expand on what you're saying: https://eagleman.com/latest/the-mystery-of-expertise/
> It always shocks me how low this number tends to be for highly skilled craftsmen.
Generally speaking (only a Sith deals in absolutes), engineers want to engineer.
There is no incentive for management to nudge the best performing engineers to teach their expertise in their craft[s]. A high-performing engineer "reflects good" on a manger. The way incentives are generally structured, this becomes a problem that perpetuates itself: Everyone in the management pipeline gets more money for the high performing engineer to keep engineering, rather than to teach.
A 10x engineer can be turned into a 1x engineer when given enough apprentices. However, those apprentices can become 2x, 3x engineers. Ok, there must be some optimum.
Yes, this seems to happen a lot in small companies. It seems less inevitable in big ones but it still happens. You would think at a minimum AA would want to hire a journalist or similar simply to shadow him for a year, get him to dictate everything (so that he has to do as little extra effort as possible), and publish a sort-of manual from the accumulated wisdom.
The point of hiring someone specifically to do this is that he might simply want to keep on working, uninterrupted by apprentices or other demands, so the recorder must be a second person dedicated to knowledge maintenance.
> You would think at a minimum AA would want to hire a journalist or similar simply to shadow him for a year, get him to dictate everything (so that he has to do as little extra effort as possible), and publish a sort-of manual from the accumulated wisdom.
This is, pardon the cliche, the exact type of “outside of the box” thinking that is completely impossible in shareholder-driven (or PE-driven) corporate America.
More and more I believe that we associate people with great ideas not because they were exceptionally capable of great thought, but because they managed to impose their ideas upon others through force of will, political chicanery, and sorcery.
Some people do a lot as least. Forrest Addy has a massive library of posts that are still the top results on Google for just about any machining problem imaginable.
It takes a rare multi-talented person to do this though. First you have to attain mastery of the craft itself, then you have to master (or at least be competent in) the art of communicating it to others.
Some mechanics are just good mechanics, and that's okay.
Huh. I was actually thinking about him a few days ago. Is he still among the living?
I remember posting on PM about 15 years ago asking how to fix a mistake I kept making and he gently smacked me on the head and basically said just learn to do it right in the first place. Which was really the only good answer!
No, he died 2 years ago. The immense knowledge and skill that he shared with everyone remains an incredibly valuable archive and hopefully remains searchable for the indefinite future.
I didn't see any details in the article other than this quote, which seems promising.
> He’s the guy who sits with the new kids at lunch and passes it on.
Be the change you wish to see in the world!
Hopefully you are apprenticing many junior engineers!
This is one of the saddest aspects of our societies being optimized for maximum short-term gains. In the past, master craftsman would own their own shop and pass it down to their apprentices, leaving a tradition and legacy that could last hundreds of years. This dynamic is becoming increasingly rare.
Yeah, my great aunt's bridge partner's husband had a cabinet shop which I used to hang out in after school when I missed the bus --- learned a lot by osmosis just hanging out and helping and doing odd chores.
When he passed away, his wife rented the shop out, to a drug addict who pawned off all the tools he could sneak out in his car.... when there was eventually an auction, not much was left, but I did at least get to buy an (empty) toolbox he had had me assemble from scrap lumber (which I still have on my workbench as a remembrance).
That said, for a flip side look at this sort of thing, consider the case of Charles Babbage trying to get his Analytical Engine made and the dispute over who owned the tooling, him or Joseph Clement, with the latter winning because at the time, a workman owned his tools, even if they were specifically constructed for a customer's project.
This is relative. In two generations, the concept of "master craftsman" and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm".
It is only because we know and can compare that we judge.
Remember, when we were hunter & gatherers, before becoming bound to the land and tilling that land, we had different gifts and talents that have all been lost. For better or worse.
Or closer to home: barely anyone remembers black and white television or the feeling it must have been to view the moon landing on one.[1] Cathode ray TVs have gone the way of the Dodos - good or bad? Who knows.
Whether a long term or short term outlook is better or worse, no one can tell because there aren't any goals nor targets to meet in evolution.
> barely anyone remembers black and white television
I feel like some "old" people have the weird idea that "young" people are just clueless about anything older than themselves. Just because some technology is no longer in use, does not mean that you don't get in touch with it. You don't grow up in isolation. There are always museums and of course the appliances of your parents and grandparents, in this case their photos.
All the films beyond some point are black and white and it's not like there were no significant events during that time. (Although I have seen some color-pictures from the 1900s, but the majority of course wasn't.)
Sure, you only use the technology from the past 15-20 years in daily life, but I feel like the technology you get in touch with is more closer to 80-100 years.
Black and white TV left enough of a cultural impact that despite not living through that era, when I got a black and white e-ink smartphone recently I joked that if I were to watch the snooker on it I'd have to judge the green by its proximity to the pink.
Also the BBC still issue black and white TV licences, I suspect my phone is eligible for one! Still about 3.5k of them working apparently.
>barely anyone remembers black and white television or the feeling it must have been to view the moon landing on one.
Apollo 11 landed in 1969. Roughly a third of living Americans are of an age to remember watching it, and more than half of them would have done so on black and white TVs. (Color TV's didn't pass 50% of sales & ownership until 1972.)
>and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm".
Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the people.
What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies?
The math is simple and they teach it in every business school in the country.
That raises the question, what came first: maths or evolution?
Of course we can apply the laws of physics and the theories of maths onto everything we see and experience around us but does that make them so - those experiences.
> What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies? Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
Take a more holistic view, what happened to all the stars and galaxies?[1]
The spiritual acceptance of the inevitable end of everything isn't taught in any business school and we are left to face/cope with that ourselves. If maths/business is your poison for coping, then so be it. I dislike reducing every experience to numbers and graphs, profit margins, win/loss and them/us.
I guess I'm trying to say is that even the biggest profit will have no longevity when compared to, even just human history, let alone the history of the universe.
[1] https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer?ra=229.6352&dec=2.0739&l...
The thing is that profit is not the only reason people do something. Some people just like their profession, I would argue that this is kinda a requirement to actually become really good. So in order to actually matter for a good skill you must lack the very argument you argue with.
The leading of companies with people not actually skilled at the craft is still a historic anomaly.
Money is not the "only" reason people do things. But it sure helps.
Would we have nearly as many slime-balls scheming up ways to plaster ads upon everyone's eyeballs and record our every movement and click if not for the money in it? At a societal level almost nothing ever gets done at scale if there isn't money in it. You remove the financial incentive and things atrophy, new investment stops replacing old, etc.
Sure, but the incredible skilledness in a single craft, which we are discussing here, doesn't happen at a societal level. That is the hard work of an individual and has always been.
At the societal level it's a numbers game. These people are the end of a very long tail. If you reduce the area under the curve you also reduce the long tail.
Tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, real estate development companies, banks, and others plan for decades.
People also lend money and invest in equities like index funds to plan for decades.
None of those industries create the material or social plenty that make us all richer.
You cannot eat real estate or stock options, the medical industry is a drag on us all though obviously you can cherry pick examples where things don't look perverse.
Am I being trolled? People live in buildings developed by real estate development companies, people take life saving and life extending medicines made by pharmaceutical companies, and people communicate and navigate using the electronics made by tech companies.
The things they create (and not exclusively they, obviously the country as a whole creates too) directly lead to the share price increases and dividends that allow many or most people in the US to maintain purchasing power.
>Am I being trolled? People live in buildings developed by real estate development companies, people take life saving and life extending medicines made by pharmaceutical companies, and people communicate and navigate using the electronics made by tech companies.
When you look at indoor square footage per capita (so like include the average HNer's share of the Starbucks and Whole Foods they patronize) and square footage and compare that to unit development trends and look at the costs it looks like we're just building bigger boxes rather than more of them. Basically the same story of the winners carrying the average that you see in every other market segment. Real estate development is probably one of the best market segments that illustrates the "K shaped economy".
Likewise with medical. It's probably a fools errand to try and figure out whether wiping the elderly's asses is over sold or drugs are over sold and both sides claim they're creating Real Value (TM) and making people's lives better but when you zoom out and look at how much we pay for all that it's clear that something is very wrong and it's a monetary drag on us that prevents us from being to spend our money on hookers and blow and Big Macs (or whatever it is that we want to spend out money on).
I didn't mention the tech industry in my quip because it makes things people elect to use voluntarily (to an extent, try not having an email these days) rather than structures itself to essentially compel more money to be spent within it like the industries within real estate development and medical do.
Those are all very different topics/claims than
>Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.
On the other hand, doing the same work (let alone the same job) for all of my adult life would be actual spirit-breaking torture for me.
I respect people who can do it, who can live a simple life doing the same thing every single day and be happy about it. Sometimes I wish I had that ability. But it is very much _not_ me.
There are two sorts of folks working in the trades: the ones who claim to have multiple years of experience, but in truth have the same year of experience repeated, and those who for each year they have worked, have applied the past towards learning and improving their mastery of the craft.
See: https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...
I used to think the same way. Well, I still think it I guess, but different perspective on it nowadays. People always asked me how I didn't get bored just sitting in front of the computer all day, all they saw was "Sitting in front of computer" so of course it looked the same to them. But to me it's a world of difference between what you do on the computer so no, spending 12 hours in front of the computer was never boring, there are countless of different things you could be doing.
Then I caught myself thinking the same way about the fisherman that lives next door, who I pass every day and he sits and does something with his fishing nets. To me, it all looks the same way, so I asked myself how he can sit every day doing the same thing, over and over again. Asking him about it, apparently it's not so "the same" every day to him, as depending on the expected weather and what not, he prepares the net differently, and sometimes tries new things for various reasons. Maybe he is bored after all these years, I never asked, but I learned not to assume at least that things might look the same from the outside, but the person might be having a completely different perspective on it.
Like a taxi driver, it's just "driving all day" right? For a lot of people, seemingly this brings them a "no day is ever the same" experience and they love it and don't see any repetition, at least lots of drivers I've talked to felt this way.
> They spend their century maintaining/creating some of the best work on the planet but when they disappear, unenumerable amount of knowledge, tips and experience silently disappears as quickly as it was gained, and it's sad to observe every single time.
Every single possible airplane maintenance operation is detailed on task cards that mechanics follow. Probably there is some small amount of tribal knowledge, but virtually everything is documented with step-by-step procedures, which includes the tools you need, every step, all torque values, etc.
It’s not like being an electrician or pipefitter where you have to make your pipe or conduit get from point A to point B by following the construction code, airplane safety is crucial enough that documenting and standardizing airplane maintenance was done long ago.
We let CEOs earn unlimited money. They cut all the training to be personally richer.
Vote republicans out so we can restore the 1950s tax rates and financial regs that prevented CEOs fron cutting wages and outsourcing to make themselves personally richer. CEOs pay nothing for their stock, it is given them for free. Then they take tax free loans on the stock and that allows them to bubble the stock price for tax free loan money. CEOs self enrich off of a cycle of bubbles and pops.
If only there was a way to directly share those understandings with others, through genetic material or something...
Their status and whatever wage they commanded depended on training as few apprentices as possible.
Incorrect. I don't think I've met one person that were actually good at their job but didn't wanted to share the skill.
It's because management didn't value it. They put the veteran on on more jobs rather on moving them to training, because short term it's more profitable, and mid term it's easier to poach veterans off competition rather than train them in house
How do you explain guilds restricting supply then? (The most common example is Physicians).
OT, but Azriel/Azrael translates to the Grim Reaper/Angel of Death [0].
Well, it translates to "God is my Help", it's just that the angel called that is identified with the Angel of Death!
Possibly the website has been hugged to death, but the principle resonates with me from the headline. In the large and old enterprises I've worked with, there is such a stark shift from I suppose, lifetime service to the consultant economy as the workforce transition follows the boomer generation out, and forecasting where that might leave us.
Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.
Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.
The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.
just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.
80 years if career? Is that even possible? I mean if that is true definitely he was good at his job that his employer did not want him to leave or he was really really loving his job that he was the best at it.
"just 50 cents per hour" which was 1.66x minimum wage at the time.
Aviation Legend. RIP Azriel.
Hang on... My comment was not made "hours ago". It was made 3 days (2026-08-29) before this post reached the front page.
You can hover over the "hours ago" link and the timestamp does not match the title.
Why is the timestamp of my comment (and many others) of this post manipulated? Was this post recently merged with another duplicate?
"second-chance" pool or the "repost invited" pool. Seems it's not on https://news.ycombinator.com/invited so "second-chance" seems to be what happened. Introduced a mere 5 years ago :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Interesting you've been here at least since then and haven't noticed it before, happens relatively often, dare I say at least once a day?
I didn't know about it until one of my submissions was chosen as a second chance. Just one of the many features that old-timers have to pass on to the new blood
Yeah, but that's different from what they're talking about. It looks like the code for comment timestamps has a bug where the human-readable version keys off the updated story timestamp or something?
No, what happens when an old submission goes through that invited/second-chance process is that any comments made on the submission would have their timestamps updated, so comments I left days ago, could show up as being made hours/minutes ago, although I didn't personally repost them. Exactly what parent describes.
I'm guessing HN either by choice or by accident shows the "original timestamp" in that title attribute, while the user-facing rendering shows the newly bumped timestamp.
Dear God, I hope he transferred that knowledge the best he could.
4dd
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His late wife: He went to work to play with his friends.
The man clearly found the right job for himself. Happy for him and his long career.
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Somebody in his position (major crew chief, maxed out seniority) would've been making about 120k real dollars, plus his defined benefit retirement, plus flight benefits for him and family, for the past few decades. He spent his time off volunteering to fix museum aircraft so we can say he really really loved the work.
It seems like this guy just truly loved his work. It's ok to be inspired by his passion rather than immediately turning to the most cynical explanation for his long tenure.
Or, you know, some people like their fucking jobs. Not everything needs to be some min-max'ed income thing - sometimes people do what they love, as utterly mind-blowing and completely incomprehensible as that apparently is to the folks raised on social media.