[matt4077]

Airline safety has increased by a factor of 100 in the last 50 years, in terms of fatalities / miles travelled. Both in the past and now, far more accidents are the result of pilot error than failure of any system.

Gloryfing the good old days of pilot jocks just isn’t supported by the actual data, this incident nonewithstanding.

[deepstream]

at least you're not in charge of anything.

the plane's crashing, and you're telling the pilots (who you think might be jocks which makes you feel...even less safe?), "No don't turn it off, I have 50 years of data that says systems are safe." perfect example of doing data wrong. crazy dangerous arrogant ideas like this contributed to this tragedy.

when the systems are failing, you better hope you have some pilot jocks / true fixed wing enthusiasts at the controls, who know how to make the systems work for them, or take control if they fail, rather than some data jocks, with blinkered faith in the systems, who count cost of lives as "notwithstanding".

flyers deserve competence from their systems and data, not just from their pilots. we need pilots who have earned their capabilities, and systems that have earned their impression of reliability. current MCAS occupies a privileged position in charge of safety it has not earned.

[xmeyers]

Isn't that orthogonal to the previous statement? The ideal situation would be to have fly-by-wire and a single hands-off button instead of HAL saying "Sorry Dave, but I cannot do that".

Of course, commercial pilots would need to have an actual interest in flying manually. The Gimli glider pilot was an enthusiastic pilot outside professional aviation.

I don't know if such an interest is still possible with modern exploitative labor practices.

[femto113]

I’d go beyond an “off switch” and argue that any software that’s smart enough to turn itself on without being asked needs to turn itself off if it’s obvious that the pilot is fighting against it. It’s like a classic Bayesian probability problem where the chance of a false positive is high. The software has to take into account that the stall scenario it thinks is happening is rare, and that happening followed by a pilot yanking back on the stick is vanishingly rare, accept that it was probably wrong and undo its actions.