It's also about the crises of ethics inherent to the aviation industry: cutting corners during inspections, manufacturing things on the cheap, outsourcing maintenance work, and rushing through the approval process for new planes.
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Before anyone goes completely over the edge, try to remember that there are other issues too:
Developing new aircraft is very expensive, made more so because of the demand for even greater automation, greater efficiency, and ferocious competition. Boeing is the last major American passenger aircraft manufacturer, Lockheed, Mcdonnell Douglas and others long gone, thanks to intense competition, expense of production and liability.
Airbus is government- supported and competing unfairly. They have also had numerous accidents attributed to failures of sensors, computer-induced problems, and bad luck.
We demand aviation safety and that our companies remain competitive in a cut throat market. Fair enough - but don’t assume that anything was done deliberately to kill people.
Are these terrorist attacks? Are these aircraft being hijacked electronically?
These aircraft can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
There’s no shortage of money being spent. The cost per airframe is already totally out of control. It’s another example of technological feature creep. Just because the aircraft CAN have a feature may not mean it should. The problem lies with both over regulation and too thin margins without adequate breathing room to just “operate.”
In the quest for ultimate efficiency per flight aircraft design has changed. We need to be asking ourselves if, for commercial aircraft, the aerodynamics need to be constrained to only designs that meet more stringent standards for inherent stability in flight. That means, FLYABLE, even when all automated assistance is turned off. If a pilot turns all the assistance off and has nothing but control of airspeed, pitch, roll and yaw can he easily fly the aircraft without knowing about two dozen killer quirks in the flight envelope?
There shouldn’t be more than one or two oddities in the flight characteristics but those should be easily managed MANUALLY if necessary. If they aren’t easily managed manually then the design needs to be changed.
If that means airframe design has to be kept simpler, that designs can’t carry as much weight per flight or are 5% less fuel efficient because of that simplification of aerodynamic design... then maybe that would still be a good thing.
I’m not saying we should do it this way, but it is worth considering.
I have a question? Living on the border here in Tx WHO approves Mexican commercial airlines to use our air space..these are NOT American planes but Mexican. You can tell because those planes fly over our area so extremely low you can see their blue logos. There is an airport close to our border but never flew over our properties before until recently. Someone designated our area as a circling landing path for those planes...who? Not only do I feel those planes are unsafe, I’m ticked off because those bastards do not want to help stop the invasion but are granted rights to fly over our space without consequence!! Screw that!! With all the plane problems from third world countries why would our government endanger their citizens...sorry but I don’t trust Mexican pilots one iota!!! ANY ADVICE IS WELCOMED!!
I just read a report that said the Russian Plane crash was caused by lightning.
I knew it was just a matter of time before some idiot started drawing parallels between Aeroflot and the current msm obsession with Boeing.
How many plane crashes have happened the past couple weeks? It seems like a ton :(
I agree that automation makes people lazy and unprepared, and sometimes incompetent, but in the case of Russia, it’s likely that the pilots had military training and at least were competent...at least when they were younger. Who knows after 20 years though.