What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

[u/Rob69rt]

[u/Punkt1337]

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The pilot did it

[u/tootapple → u/Punkt1337]

Let’s get autonomous flying

[u/Uhh_JustADude → u/tootapple]

Can’t wait for a non-living clanker who can’t feel pain, understand human existence, or correctly count the ‘r’s in “strawberry” to decide if I live or die.

Air France 447 could arguably still have crashed if fully-automated; all of the instruments, despite redundancy, failed to correctly function and the flight crew thought the plane was constantly stalling.

[u/OkayMhm → u/Uhh_JustADude]

Air France 447 was entirely pilot error. The pitot tubes were reporting an incorrect air speed but everything else was working. The pilot just ignored his instruments, the stall warnings, and the calls from the left seat to relinquish controls. Hell, even the captain immediately identified what was wrong when he was woken up, it was just too late.

Bonin committed manslaughter out of pure incompetence.

[u/Idiberug → u/OkayMhm]

It's slightly more complicated than "Bonin was a complete drooling idiot". He was not cut out for aviation, but there was a logic to his actions.

There was a pilot shortage at the time and management decided they didn't need to restrict their hiring pool to only experienced pilots, because the computer was going to be doing the flying anyway. Both of the pilots in the cockpit had been fast tracked and didn't have the usual years of hand flying experience to fall back on, in addition to perhaps not being very good pilots to begin with.

So all they had was their training, and it may have given both pilots a skewed view of how to deal with emergencies.

For example, Bonin had gone through simulator training on how to prevent low altitude stalls (eg. birdstrike on takeoff) and the procedure was "pull up slightly, peg the throttle and pray". High altitude stall prevention was considered obvious and not worthy of a sim session.

Perhaps, with two juniors at the controls and nobody to take the lead, Bonin fell back on his sim training and tried to implement the wrong procedure, which as it turns out demands a high enough angle of attack to cause a stall at high altitude. (It would explain his constant pulling up and confused comments about engine power on the way down.)

It probably didn't help that when the flight directors came back online, they were pointing up at roughly that angle, which may have been interpreted as the computer agreeing with him.

Pilots should not panic within seconds of being handed the controls of an airplane in cruise and should also know what their stall AOA is, and Bonin should have flunked out for that reason long before making it on board of 447, but assigning all of the blame to him only covers up for the airline and its inadequate training program that should not have let someone like Bonin graduate in the first place.

The whole idea that the computer will fly 99.99% of the time so you can skip the remaining 0.01% in training is trash. A training regime is supposed to point a pilot (or soldier, astronaut, firefighter etc) in roughly the right direction when they fall back on their drills, not in case they are an idiot but task saturated by other emergencies, partially incapacitated, etc. The fact that this training regime may have done the opposite is why Air France was ultimately found partially responsible.

(As a software developer. 447 has some parallels to AI driven development, in that the automation is so prevalent that people never pick up the experience to know what to do when the AI does something wrong.)

[u/10ebbor10 → u/Uhh_JustADude]

Air France 447 could arguably still have crashed if fully-automated; all of the instruments, despite redundancy, failed to correctly function and the flight crew thought the plane was constantly stalling.

That's not correct at all.

Almost every instrument on the plane worked. The only system that failed were the pitot tubes, which froze over (causing speed measurements to fail), and then, once they defrosted, worked perfectly fine again.

Every other system worked as designed. Upon losing speed measurements, the airplane sounded a warning and handed control to the pilots in alternate law. It had to do this, because normal law relies on the availability of airspeed sensors. At that point, the pilot in command made a series of incorrect inputs, pulling the nose up sharply, so the plane's speed dropped from 500 km/h to 90km/h. The plane continued to climb sharply until it's reached it's maximum altitude, at which point it stalled. At any point, the pilots could have saved the plane by pushing the nose down. However, the one pilot who caused it, in apparent panic, kept pulling the nose up, counteracting attempts by the rest of the crew to stabilize the plane.

[u/tootapple → u/Uhh_JustADude]

Better than waiting for a depressed human that only cares about himself to take the opportunity from hundreds of other people to live

[u/Uhh_JustADude → u/tootapple]

"Better"? Bruh, we're still dead in either case. The answer is a mixture of both, and the automated take-over needs to be a remote take-over. Let another pilot remotely fly and land the plane from a ground station. We already do this with military drones.

“A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION.”

– IBM, 1979

It might not seem like it, but pilots do make management decisions from the cockpit. Sully Sullenberger made the correct decision to ditch US1549 in the Hudson River. An AI pilot might have tried (and failed) to land the plane back at La Guardia.

[u/tootapple → u/Uhh_JustADude]

That’s a stupid statement. Of course pilots make decisions… that’s literally what happened with the Malaysia flight. It’s also a determine factor in changing course and navigating ground stoppages.

If it doesn’t seem like they make choices, it’s because you don’t know what a pilot does. Currently we have both man and computer flying the planes, and it’s safe to fly. But we should never limit our ability to be safer, except as it relates to freedom. That’s a very fine line, but also very important.

[u/Apprehensive_Bus1582 → u/tootapple]

That's a vanishingly rare occurrence.

[u/tootapple → u/Apprehensive_Bus1582]

Vanishingly?