Many of us are wary of handing over our lives to another person, especially in a situation where there is no escape if things go wrong, so when we learn of increased risks in modern air transport we are naturally concerned, and recently there have been too many crashes with enormous loss of life.
Lion Air Flight 610 plunged into the sea off Indonesia because the pilot “lost (the) fight with his software,” Canadian Transport minister Marc Garneau chillingly told a Wednesday press conference announcing the grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX 8.
There was nothing wrong with the basic mechanics of the aircraft: Its engines, wings and control surfaces are all believed to be working fine. Rather, the passenger jet may have killed 346 people for the terrifyingly modern reason that human pilots were unable to override a malfunctioning computer.
The cause of the Lion Air crash — and the suspected cause of the recent downing of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 — is a little-known piece of software known as MCAS, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System.
The 737 MAX 8 has heavier and more fuel-efficient engines than prior editions of the 737, a change which causes the aircraft to pitch upwards ever-so-slightly after takeoff.
Rather than instructing airlines to warn their pilots of this quirk, Boeing simply equipped the MAX 8 with MCAS, a program that would automatically tilt the nose downwards to compensate.
Unaware of this automatic system, which was interfering with normal flight because of erroneous information, the pilots fought the computer until the tragic end.
We have always been led to believe that the pilot can, in emergency take over the manual flying of the airplane, but often we tend to believe that our technology cannot be wrong . In the final analysis though, the man is to be trusted more than the machine, and pilots should be trained to accept that responsibility and be provided with a simple switch which places the entire control of the plane back into their hands.
Until this is done and that doing made public, some of us will be doing as little flying as possible!
‘For surely we will die and be like water poured out on the ground, which cannot be recovered. Yet God does not take away a life; but He devises ways so that the banished one may not remain estranged from Him.’ 2 Samuel 14:14.