I was watching a video taken from the inside of the cockpit of a commuter plane landing at a small airport in the foot hills... on downwind, base and final a computer voice was giving dire sounding terrain warnings and even saying repeatedly, “Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!” on short final. The pilot of course was wisely ignoring this distraction and just flying his plane, but it kind of made me glad that I don't have that kind of crap installed in our airplane.
The worst landing I ever made... I was coming into a small airport that I had been to before, on short final my passengers yelled out, “Watch out for those wires!” The wires of course went under the runway, but he saw the poles on both sides that had conduits that routed the wires down.
It distracted me for a moment at a critical time in the landing sequence. I nosed up briefly which caused the plane to lose airspeed. I immediately pointed the nose back down, but then I had to flair much more than normal to arrest our descent as we entered ground effect near the surface of the runway. This put us in a nose high attitude and the tie down for the tail actually started scraping on the ground before the main gear touched the pavement. It made a bad noise but fortunately did not hurt anything other than scraping off about a quarter inch of aluminum from the tie down.
To me this 777 accident sounds a little like a jumbo sized version of what happened to me during my worst landing. My guess is that something distracted the pilot and caused him to deviate from his normal approach with tragic consequences.
The safety nazis have created an atmosphere whereby in an effort to make a situation foolproof, they have actually made it worse. It's like that in the electric power industry as well. And, I'm sure, many other industries. They try to codify all actions, eliminating the thought process from all activities.
This is the classic "boy who cried wolf" scenario - the alarms go off so often for mundane, unimportant reasons that when something critical does happen, the pending alarm is ignored. In effect, the warning system has cried wolf so many times that it isn't believed when the proverbial wolf does appear.
Very illuminating story. I’ve learned far more from Freepers than from the MSM