Fake Pilot License Template
Kistiñe Dziuk
A 2013 article being widely circulated by news outlets, journalists and social media users, which claims that the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) praised Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz as setting a "positive example", is fake, Newsweek can reveal.
The article, published by a site claiming to be the 'Aviation Business Gazette', claims that the pilot believed to have flown the Germanwings aircraft into a mountain in France, killing all 150 on board, had "exceeded the high educational, licensing and medical standards established by the FAA". It adds that the FAA pilot certification "can be the difference between a safe flight and one that ends in tragedy" and advises against "flying with an uncertified pilot".
The article on Germanwings pilot has been shared by U.S.-based news site Drudge Report and reporters from the BBC, CNN, Fox News offshoot Fox 5 DC, Russia Today and the San Francisco Chronicle. It has amassed over 400 shares on Facebook in the hours after the identification of Lubitz. The article was shared by The Guardian on its live coverage of the incident but, when notified of the false article by Newsweek, they subsequently amended their blog to reflect this.
However, the FAA database in question only shows that Lubitz held a private pilot (foreign based) license, only valid with his German pilot license number. This was confirmed by an FAA spokesperson, who said: "He only has a private pilot certificate, he does not have any honours or awards to his name given by the FAA."
The article itself links to comments made by U.S. transportation secretary Anthony Foxx regarding the qualification rise for pilots who fly U.S. passenger airlines. However, Lubitz flew for Lufthansa, a German airline, discounting that the FAA ever lauded Lubitz for his flying ability.
Furthermore, the 2013 rule says that, to meet the qualification requirements to become a co-pilot for a U.S. airline, the increased minimum amount of flight hours is 1,000. German authorities have confirmed that Lubitz only held 630 hours of flight experience.
Bizarrely, the website in fact has an identical article for every member of the FAA's Airmen Certification Database, published on the same date, 18 September 2013, as seen in the screenshot below, indicating that the FAA did not single out Lubitz for praise.
The site itself only has five articles about aviation and one entitled '50 quotes to help you find happiness'. It also hosts a number of spam-like 'Adchoice' advertisements to gain pay-per-click revenue.
Update: The National Safety and Transportation board has issued a statement apologizing for a summer intern who confirmed fake and racist Asiana Airlines pilot names to Bay Area station KTVU, which broadcast them on Friday.
Bay Area TV station KTVU, whose initial video footage of the Boeing 777 crash that left three dead and many wounded on Sunday was carried by major networks, is in hot water for falsely reporting the names of the Asiana Airlines pilots.
The process of innovation is an iterative and conditional one. Where you start, what tools you use, and when you use them will depend greatly on the context of the problem space, who is on your project team, and your access to users and stakeholders. The double diamond framework and the tools highlighted below are a collection of ingredients rather than a linear or rigid recipe for success.
As you move through the innovation process, you will find yourself balancing convergent and divergent thinking and understanding problems and solutions simultaneously. We hope you find this toolkit to be a helpful resource and that you reference it often to help inspire and guide successful innovation.
Conducting contextual inquiry starts the design process but should be done continuously to help you learn more about the problem, how users and other stakeholders define success, and gather the insight you need to develop and evaluate successful and lasting solutions.
Do the things they are required to do to gain a firsthand experience of the challenges they face. Completing a day in the life exercise will enable you to uncover actionable insights and build empathy for the people you're hoping to help.
Sensemaking involves organizing all of the data and insights you gather through contextual inquiry and design experimentation to identify patterns and themes to guide the direction of your design process. Sensemaking frameworks will help you visually organize data, manage complexity, and communicate project direction with stakeholders.
Details on users' thoughts, emotions, and feedback are then added to the timeline to provide a holistic view of the experience or journey. Journey mapping will help you uncover what's working well in the current state and identify key pain points that need addressing.
From there, you can use the five whys to drill down to the next level root causes of that problem definition, building out different tentacles. Continuing to ask "Why?" and "Why else?" will enable you to get to the most granular root causes of the problem.
When you have defined a solution you'd like to test, ask yourself, "What must be true for this to work?" Once you have a complete list, plot your assumptions on a 2x2 matrix where one axis is how certain you are that your assumption is accurate and the other is how detrimental it will be if it is not.
Mapping assumptions will help you determine what you need to test to de-risk a potential solution. Assumptions that you are uncertain about and that are crucial for your solution to work are your riskiest assumptions.
Ask yourself, "How would Amazon, Airbnb, or Warby Parker solve this problem?" If you need to make something go faster, does EZ Pass or Disney Parks offer a useful model? Other times, you might identify elements of multiple solutions that combined could solve your issue.
As opposed to fake front ends, fake back ends can produce a real outcome for target users on a small scale. For example, suppose you pretend to be the automated back end of a two-way texting service during a pilot. In that case, the user will receive answers from the service, just ones generated by you instead of automation.
Mini-pilots will allow you to learn by doing, usually by deploying a fake back end. You might try a new intervention with ten patients over two days in one clinic, using manual processes for what might ultimately be automated.
Running a "pop-up" novel clinic or offering a different path to a handful of patients will enable you to learn what works and what doesn't more quickly. And, limiting the scope can help you gain buy-in from stakeholders to get your solution out into the world with users and test safely.
In contrast, diary studies are done remotely and asynchronously, allowing researchers flexibility and access to distributed users. Diary studies can often be conducted at a lower cost than field studies or contextual inquiries.
Contextual and longitudinal insights cannot be collected through single-session moderated user-research methods, like usability testing or user interviews. These types of methods typically remove users from their personal context and take place over a short time.
Diary studies are useful for exploring a wide variety of research questions about long-term experiences and repetitive activities. You might decide to conduct a diary study when you have research questions about the following aspects of an experience.
Diary studies get their name from the way this type of research was traditionally conducted. Research participants were asked to keep a physical diary, documenting relevant behaviors and experiences during a defined period of time.
Today, we have access to a host of digital tools that can make running diary studies much more efficient for both participants and researchers. However, the underlying method is still the same. Participants are asked to log specific information about activities being studied.
Selecting the right tool(s) for data collection is a decision that should be made based on a variety of factors. We discuss tool selection in detail later in this article. However, one of the primary considerations in tool selection will be driven by your research questions and the focus of your study.
There are three common methods for gathering insights during diary studies: event-based, interval-based, and signal-based. Each study's unique research goals, questions, and focus will help researchers determine the best method for gathering information from participants. Many studies use a combination of these methods.
You may need to do some exploration to understand the typical frequency or length of activities, but ultimately, the reporting period you select should be one that will give you enough data points across your whole participant sample.
Because a diary study takes place over a longer time than a regular usability-testing study, there is a higher chance that participants will drop out of the study due to unexpected circumstances in their lives. Consider overrecruiting in preparation for potential dropouts so that you have enough data points in the end.
The best sample size to reach saturation depends on how broad your research questions or the problem space are and on how varied or homogenous your target user group is. The more variety in your user group, the more participants you will need to recruit to get a representative mix of users. And, the broader the research questions, the more people you will need to recruit to ensure enough insight coverage across all questions.
Expect that your participants' number of responses may vary. In some situations, you might allow participants to report activities beyond the minimum and earn more for doing so. However, if you do so, you should also designate a maximum number of responses that participants can submit, to avoid having respondents manufacture fake interactions to earn more money.
Diary-study incentives should be higher than those for a typical user-testing session due to the long-term engagement required. Consider the length of the study and the effort required for participants to provide all the information you need, utilizing the tools you select.
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