[LINK] Flash drives in the sea?

[Martin Barry]

$quoted_author = "Jeremy Visser" ;
> 
> On 7 May 2014, at 18:13, Andy Farkas <andyf at andyit.com.au> wrote:
>
> > On 07/05/14 09:48, Jim Birch wrote:
> >> My feeling would be that the vast majority of air accidents
> >> occur due to deviations from accepted best practice, eg, pilot error.
> > 
> > Have you never watched the "Air Crash Investigation" TV show?
> > 
> > Type it into youtube.
> 
> I think your intention was to contradict the above, but anecdotally most
> episodes that I have see depict pilot error or some other human error
> (e.g. procedure not followed) as the cause rather than mechanical failure.

What they usually show is that:

- there is almost always a confluence of multiple problems, any of which
  individually would have been relatively harmless

- that the interaction between man and machine is complex and what seems
  obvious to the designer of a system does not carry over so well into times
  of stress

- that the levels of automation present in current generation aircraft are
  reducing the "hands on" time that pilots get and making the time they do
  harder to understand through their "assistance" and their "modes" (e.g.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes and the impact of a
  switch to "alternate law" in the AF447 crash)

This is a great talk on this kind of thing
http://fractio.nl/2013/05/15/escalating-complexity-af447/

cheers
Marty