261–270 of 277 posts
Let's call this a suicide attack and this co-pilot a terrorist. Secondly, find out his religion and prefix this with terrorist. Prefixing his race will also be a plus point. Once all unknowns are calculated, ask his religion/race fellows to apologize this act of terrorism.
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This responsibility is to great to leave it to humans. Automate this stuff.
There's always going to be a human involved at some point (at least until the machines take over, but then they probably won't be flying us around). If it's all automated, then instead of a crazy pilot killing everyone on his airliner, it might be a crazy programmer killing everyone on every airborne airliner.
I was recently flying in a small airplane (SR22) and the terrain detection system was going bonkers when we were landing saying that terrain was getting close to us. They have all the data, they just need to build in some more protections.
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Preventing accidents and stopping a rogue insider are very different issues. Remote control opens a bunch of new attack surfaces, while not helping with the original problem.
Just because they're "very" different issues doesn't preclude there being a technical solution that helps solve parts of both problems.
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Except there are checks and balances in place before software gets installed on a plane.
Those don't always work. There are checks and balances in place before pilots get to fly airplanes, too.
In the context of a pilots mental state verses malicious source code being installed on a set of flight computers, I'd have to say the computer is easier to validate. That many more people have to approve the process. With a pair of pilots the validation process is much smaller and more complex.
We need to stop thinking that machines are flawed and that humans know best. The fact of life is that machines can and do perform better than humans, the only reason flight computers don't currently is that there hasn't been the investment in making them do so. Sensors fail but that is an engineering problem that can be solved.
Of course it's really early so you have to be very careful as to making judgements at this point, but if it really is pilot murder/suicide there is some (limited) precedence:- * An EgyptAir flight in 1999 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990 * A Silkair (Singapore airline) flight in 1997 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185 There is debate in both flights as to whether it was murder/suicide…
The Egyptair flight had the crashing pilot saying prayers to Allah all the way down, captured on the voice recorder. The engines were shut off and the other officer was fighting the stick all the way down. There is zero doubt as to what happened, only a political cover up by Egypt air authorities after they realised what had happened.
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If you add some additional information on the status of the plane (engines, electronics, etc) in addition to the telemetry you could infer much more on the current situation aboard the plane. In this case the simple reversal of the initiation of the descent (as a precautionary measure) might have prevented the unfolding of events. Obviously we can all think of corner cases where the pilots and the ATC would come to d…
"In this case the simple reversal of the initiation of the descent (as a precautionary measure) might have prevented the unfolding of events." I think you might have missed my point. What telemetry do you think would have given ATC enough information in 8 minutes that would tell them reversing the descent is the correct course of action? If anything, the data in this flight would have indicated that the dive was init…
Airline pilots are a highly selective group of people, well trained, and they are showing every day how they work with integrity. That someone has once gone over and killed himself and others should not obscure our assessment of the situation. We have about 88 000 departures per day in the world. We don't accept even ppm-range risks of disaster if we know how to mitigate them, but when we're this low, we need to be careful that "improvements" don't actually degrade performance.
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No. This is not Hollywood, and A320 is not a UAV. There's no option "hack into the thing and fly it from the back seat" (do I need to explain, here on HN, why a lack of remote control is also a Good Thing? "I've got the same combination on my luggage!")
It is extremely scary to me that you have to point this out to individuals. How does the reasoning process work for people who think like that? It must go something like "I can share photos with my mom on Facebook, so it must be possible to remotely fly a plane! #technologythatdoesntexistyet"
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I wonder, since the plane wasnt nosediving, it was descending, and the radars could probably detect that it wasnt descending to any place to land. Couldn't a remote operator stop the descent?
Now you've just changed the scenario from "rogue pilot crashes airplane despite efforts of other pilot" to "rogue air traffic controller crashes airplane despite efforts of pilots."
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> So the reinforced door is a response to a problem that no longer exists. I very much disagree. Previously, an attacker could get to the cockpit by surprise and by suddenly overwhelming cabin crew. That is now much. much more difficult.
How? The door is still locked, just not heavily reenforced. Passengers are going to notice someone trying to kick the door down and you can believe that person will be taken care of quickly.
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1) No. 2) Because it does not attempt to advance any political agenda.
So this means that his reason must be personal and important only to himself. That leaves me wondering, what personal reason can one have to do such a thing?