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 “normal”, to “alternate”, to “abnormal alternate” to “direct”. 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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