What caused the Malaysian plane to disappear? From everything I have read or seen so far the likely culprit is not human. Not Human? No.
The most likely culprit is the computer driving the automatic pilot. Now, calling this an automatic pilot would be like calling cruise control cruise control if you couldn't easily disengage it when you wanted too.
What most people don't know (because airlines don't want to scare passengers) is that autopilots now take precedence over pilots. So, pilots have become more computer operators more than any other single thing.
The public generally speaking doesn't know about this just like most people might not understand how jet engines, flying surfaces, or computers that make autopilots more or less autonomous operate.
However, all this started as a way not to lose fighter planes during flight training of pilots or by accident. So computers actually started driving the planes and they only listened to the pilots when the pilot's control of the plane wouldn't rip wings off at high speed or rip control surfaces or the tail off of the plane or something like that. After a time, this same Computer driven plane concept moved to passenger planes as a way to protect planes from crashing, or when unexpected up or down drafts might rip wings or control surfaces off. (a computer can respond to this kind of problem much faster than a pilot could(theoretically). This sort of worked well in maintaining planes in workable order along the way.
However, at some point all this stopped working about 1% of the time or less. And this is one of those 1% of the time or less when pilots couldn't disengage their autopilot, I believe.
So, when the autopilot flying the plane malfunctioned it didn't do so in a way that the pilot or co-pilot noticed in time. So, slowly it flew the plane upwards for some reason to 45,000 feet or more at which time the cockpit or whole fuselange decompressed either explosively or slowly so people didn't notice anything was seriously wrong until it was too late because the pressure had reduced so much they all (pilots or the whole plane) went unconscious. When the pilots went unconscious they tried to save the plane by trying to turn the power off on the autopilot when they couldn't disengage it. The likely finally succeeded did the strange maneuvers and then as they started to go unconscious themselves they repowered the autopilot knowing they wouldn't be able to fly the plane themselves soon and hoping someone else might save them. The autopilot flew until the plane ran out of fuel at that point. Even if people behind the cockpit door wanted in and had an axe or pistol the cockpit door cannot be breached. So, you might have had a planeload of people knowing something was wrong and not being able to get into the cockpit to save themselves.
Another 777 couldn't disengage their autopilot and almost crashed that was a Malaysian air lines plane too before this. There was a software patch required to be installed in all 777s after this worldwide. But, if it was installed Malaysia and Malaysian Air Lines has made no mention of it.
Just like GM has swept problems with their cars under the carpet since 2001 and many younger people mostly have died as a result since then (the GM head has been testifying to congress lately), I expect 15 years from now or less you are going to have the head of Boeing testifying before congress regarding this Malaysian plane too. The problem will likely be that we will be then have 15 or 20 more crazy disappearances of planes just like this one from Malaysian air lines and others who have not fixed their autopilots.
Another crash caused by the air speed pitot and autopilot interface was on Air France a few years ago when the air pitot outside on the plane that registered air speed froze over for some reason in a storm at altitude. As a result of this it gave incorrect air speed readings to the autopilot computer. This caused the plane(for some reason) to slow down to where it was almost stalling which dropped the plane slowly out of the sky and eventually it crashed into the ocean before the pilots became aware of this problem soon enough because of the storm joseling them around so much.
So, the computers on autopilots are sometimes having malfunctions. This is often listed as pilot error. However, since most of the time the real pilot of the plane is the autopilot they can say this is pilot error out the corner of their mouths because the pilot really most of the time is actually the autopilot computer or computers. So, in a certain sense it is pilot error but that pilot is not human. It is more similar to what a drone does when it flies autonomously because it lost it satellite signal temporarily.
For example, the pilots on the Asiana Air Lines also 777 crash in San Francisco:
- New York Times - 3 days agoThe wreckage of Asiana Flight 214 last year. Boeing has focused on the crew's failure to maintain proper airspeed in the crash, but in a filing, ...
WASHINGTON
— While the world has been fixated on the disappearance of Malaysia
Airlines Flight 370, the Korean carrier involved in the crash of a
different Boeing 777, the Asiana flight into San Francisco last July, raised design issues on Monday that put another question mark over the model of jetliner.
The
circumstances of the crashes could not have been more different.
Asiana’s crash, into the sea wall in front of a runway at San Francisco
International Airport, was captured on video, with debris spread over a
few hundred feet of runway. Three people died and scores were injured,
but most people walked away. In contrast, everyone on the Malaysia plane
is presumed lost, and the cause is, for now, a mystery.
In
San Francisco, the prime cause was quickly clear; even Asiana faulted
its crew for failing to notice that the airplane was flying far too
slowly to stay in the air. But it is also blaming “inconsistencies in
the aircraft’s automation logic.”
The carrier said Monday in a filing with the National Transportation Safety Board
that bad software design “led to the unexpected disabling of airspeed
protection without adequate warning to the flight crew,” and that a
system to warn the crew of low airspeed did not sound soon enough. The
airline also said that the approach ordered by air traffic controllers
“led to an excessive pilot workload during the final approach.”
Boeing
has focused on the crew’s failure to maintain proper airspeed, which is
expected to be listed by the safety board as the probable cause of the
crash. Asiana’s filing is an effort by the airline to have the plane’s
design characteristics listed among the contributing factors. The
board’s conclusions are not admissible in court, but its ranking of
factors often influences how a carrier’s insurance company and the
plane’s builder apportion the damage settlements or court judgments.
In
the Asiana crash, the crew believed that an auto-throttle would
manipulate the engines to keep the plane’s airspeed in the range needed
for a safe landing, somewhat like the way the cruise control in a car
will adjust the throttle to keep the speed constant. It later became
obvious that because of a quirk in two tightly linked systems, the
autopilot and the auto-throttle, and because the crew had manually
adjusted the throttles at one point, the auto-throttle had gone into
sleep mode.
This
characteristic is well known, and occurs when the autopilot is in a
mode called flight level change, which is abbreviated on the relevant
cockpit button as “FLCH.” The abbreviation has given rise to a nickname
the pilots use for the characteristic, “the flitch trap.” After the
crash, safety board investigators were told by the specialists who train
Asiana pilots that not only were the three men in the cockpit warned
about the flitch trap, but that they had also been told that they could
expect it while landing in San Francisco because the typical approach at
the airport required a fast descent and extensive use of the autopilot
in different modes.
But
Thomas Haueter, a former director of the office of aviation safety at
the board and now a consultant to the airline, said the flitch trap was
“a bit of a setup for the unwary.”
If
the crew had turned off the auto-throttle, he said, a separate system
would have kicked in to keep the engines running hard enough to prevent
aerodynamic stall. But with the auto-throttle in sleep mode, “there’s no
protection at all, you’ve got nothing,” Mr. Haueter said.
The
Asiana pilots union, in a separate submission to the safety board, said
pilots were not trained on this characteristic of the 777.
The
airline’s submission notes that in 2010, when another Boeing plane with
a similar auto-throttle, the 787, was being certified by the Federal
Aviation Administration, the F.A.A. raised concerns about the way the
throttles went into sleep mode. But Boeing declined to make a change and
agreed with the F.A.A. to put a warning into the pilot manuals.
After
the crash, when test pilots from the F.A.A. and the airline tried to
fly the approach that air traffic controllers had given the Asiana
flight, they had severe difficulties doing so while following other
rules, according to papers filed with the board.
The
airline’s submission also acknowledges other errors by the crew. For
example, Asiana, like all big carriers, requires that the pilots be on a
“stabilized approach,” lined up horizontally and vertically, at the
proper speed with the flaps extended to the proper degree. If the crew
is still making adjustments below a certain altitude, the pilot is
supposed to break off the approach and go around for another try. In
this case, one of the pilots called out that the plane was too low.
Boeing’s
submission said that “all airplane systems were functioning as expected
prior to impact and did not contribute to the accident.” It added that
the crew had cues that it should have stopped the approach because of
the plane’s speed and because the thrust setting was incorrect.
The Asiana crash was the first fatal airline accident in the United States since February 2009.
Airline Blames Bad Software in San Francisco Crash
So, I would have to say here that the switch over to passenger planes being flown by computers autonomously isn't entirely successful. So, changes might need to be made at this point by Air Bus and Boeing so this problem is remedied.
This same problem could plague autonomously driven cars for much the same reasons in the near future. Though computers are better and faster in their reactions than humans are most of the time, they are not better than human pilots or drivers all of the time.
Basically, it could be said best like this: "Whether pilots of planes are autonomous computers or human pilots or a combination of both there are still going to be accidents where humans sometimes die in both planes and Autonomous driven cars."
So, it is mostly about learning how to reduce those deaths and injuries to a minimum and this is still a work in progress and likely always will be.
However, when really crazy stuff like happened with the Malaysian flight 370 you can almost be certain that a computer was involved. Because the only way to describe malfunctions of autonomous pilots that are computers would be the words "Crazy or stupid". Computers can be brilliant but none of them so far has even one ounce of common sense.
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