[smartmic]

> In short, the problems were human not technical.

I disagree. Problems have been in both human and technical realm and, even worse, there is no way to clearly disentangle those two factors. Good arguments are given in Charles Perrow classic work "Normal Accidents" [1]. It is worth citing the tree main conditions which will result in an accident probability of greater than acceptable

1.The system is complex

2.The system is tightly coupled

3.The system has catastrophic potential

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents

[7952]

I agree with the point about technical vs people. On HN people are more familiar with how the applies to software. It may be technically possible to write bug free safety critical code in C. But in the real world we are all human and make mistakes and we don't have any choice about that. The existence of a hypothetical perfect solution is not a good defense.