As clues trickle in on what happened to Air France 447, former CNN anchor, Miles O’Brien, on the Airbus fly-by-wire flight control system on their latest jetliners:
Now here is a key point to remember: as systems fail in an Airbus, the laws that the computers live by change from “normalâ€, to “alternateâ€, to “abnormal alternate†to “directâ€. At each stage the computers surrender more authority to the humans – until finally silicon surrenders and the carbon pilots are on their own – with no help at all from HAL – at just the point they need him most.
They were in the dark, getting hammered by turbulence, flying blind, by hand, a plane that was designed and built to be controlled by machines – with human supervision.
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