TMM1982

People don't like to be kept in the dark

sbm12

Sure, but that doesn't mean people know better than the pilots or crew what is going on nor that their demands are more important than the responsibilities the crew has to ensuring the safety of everyone.

TMM1982

I don't think anyone is contending that passengers could assist the pilots in determining what the next best course of action is. They simply want information as to what happened and what the plan is to fix it. And sooner is better than later. I'm not interested in an explanation 30 minutes after the fact.

Troopers

Ah, human error caused the aborted takeoff. That's cool that you have no problem with human error, just hope you're not piloting my upcoming flight

sbm12

I believe you have unreasonable expectations in this context.

Providing an explanation to passengers is very, very, very low on the list of priorities.

oliver2002

It seems the ecam gave a message that turned out to be wrong:

http://www.pprune.org/9213048-post50.html

cruisr

You have that right.

B747-437B

I'd rather have an explanation 30 minutes after the fact than not be around 30 minutes after the fact since someone was busy explaining rather than doing.

Suggestions of what you as a passenger should do during a potential emergency situation - review the safety instruction card, listen for instructions from the crew and mentally go over the best and backup evacuation routes for yourself. When you finish doing that, do it again and again until either you have to execute the plan or someone tells you its ok.

Suggestions of what you should not do - interfere with the crew going about their duties by demanding more information from them or asking for a refill of champagne before you have to hit the slides. Believe me, the crew have "inform the passengers" as an item on their to-do list in these situations. It's just way down the list behind things like "make sure the passengers are still around to be given the information".

B747-437B

Human factors can never be entirely eliminated as long as there are humans involved anywhere in the chain of activity related to a flight. The best you can do is to control the impact of a human error and create sufficient redundancies that a human error will be caught before it becomes potentially threatening.

By all accounts, this was a textbook case of that. There was a human error coding the nav database, but it was caught by the ECAM and therefore an RTO was executed to control the situation.