[jere]

>And let’s hope that there is no stupid 23-year-old with his finger on an important keyboard in this information chain.

No. This is something you would read in Design of Everyday Things where Don Norman would totally shame the the engineers who made that system. Software shouldn't be designed with the assumption that no one makes errors.

[ak39]

What I find incredible to believe is that this problem could have happened without the F7 erroneous keystroke by a human. A simple power outage could have resulted in this exact same catastrophe.

Why didn't the backups work? System wasn't "robust" enough. (Did I just use the word "robust"?)

[tootie]

Alan Cooper's About Face is a great book on interaction design for computers and one of his axioms is "Hide the escape lever". Basically make sure the ejector seat control isn't right next to the throttle.