[grarok]

Thank you for the acronyms, but it's still missing a lot of info. The forum post is shit-garbage. Can you please rewrite the post and make it readable by a non-asshole? UAL, Standards Captain, -400, Asiana, "right seat, left seat", "upgraded by phenomenal growth" - jesus christ what the fuck is this.

[rdl]

It's not unreasonable that in a forum for airline pilots they use the technical jargon of those airlines to discuss things among themselves. If you want to read something for the mass market, read a mass-market publication. It wasn't much more jargon-filled than your average HN post, just different industry jargon.

[brettnak]

This should help a little:

-400: Likely the 747-400. One of the variants of the 747

UAL: United Airlines

Asiana: This is the airline of the plane that crashed at SFO.

Right Seat: First Officer / Co-pilot's seat.

Left Seat: Captain / Pilot's seat.

Standards Captain: Probably means he was one of the people who would have final say in whether or not a pilot was certified to fly a specific aircraft. I believe there are two different standards, one for pilot and one for copilot, but I'm not sure.

Upgraded by Phenomenal Growth: The airline grew so fast they didn't have enough pilots so they had to promote copilots to pilots faster than they were probably qualified.

*edited to correct information based on the comment below.

[rdl]

-400 is almost certainly a Boeing 747-400, i.e. the model of 747 flown by virtually everyone now. There isn't a 777-400 yet.

[ceejayoz]

Pilots would have as much difficulty with stuff like "AWS EBS latency" that gets thrown around here.