Stephen Downes

If you want to learn about the causes and solutions to airplane crashes you'd be hard pressed to find a better source than Mayday, a video series comprising almost 500 episodes of dramatization, description and analysis. I've watched almost all of them. Here's the episode for Air France Flight 447, the airliner that disappeared over the Atlantic in 2009. What the series teaches you most of all is to eschew simplistic analyses like "the aircraft asked its pilots to do the one thing they had stopped practising: fly it themselves... the judgment underneath it had gone soft, and nobody noticed until it was needed." Yes, there was a training and ergonomic design issue that contributed to the crash. Training is often among the culprits. But what the series makes clear is that these are singular and generally unprecedented cases in a system of pilot craft, training and automation that works extremely well. Nobody is "abdicating judgment" on an airline crew. It's a severe case of misdiagnosis to suggest otherwise.