Unless the plane crash was due to a software bug, this story, however important it is, has no place here. I appreciate your interest and concern but this isn't the right forum.
The point is this has nothing to do with software or anything of interest to Hacker news. Why bother reading HN if it's going to be cluttered with posts and comments that clearly belong elsewhere (Huffingtonpost.com, Disqus, Twitter whatever...) then some sour grapes crybaby who seeks attention voted down your Karma to prove a point. I'll still read HN but some participants are just trollish. I'll never hire or work with anyone with the usernames above because in my world civility and good behavior counts, even with the "little things" like respecting HN guidelines (see below) but it's your life and do what you want with it. Sooner or later you'll put your foot in your mouth in the very worst way and panic all day over your mistake.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is a systems bug based on an underestimation of a technical bug, i.e. that flying 1,000 feet over a 32,000 feet restricted altitude was considered "safe" given the hardware used. Such an assumption ended up being wrong. OTOH, the OP makes the point that diverting flights isn't as simply as moving the joystick in a different direction, given the nature of crowded airspace and routes. It's also interesting to note, as the OP does, that flights at lower altitudes were routinely conducted over Afghanistan and Iraq.
I actually think the OP is overstating his case though...but I posted it here because I know there are flight enthusiasts who care about the details, such as whether 1,000 ft. above a restricted altitude is not much more reckless than speeding 63 mph over 65.
HN will be a sad place if it concerns itself only with bugs in pure logic, and not all the bugs and misunderstandings of details and mechanics that exist outside of software code.
Hacker News Guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.