Another Airplane Crash

News arrives of another airplane crash, this time with tragic results.

As a technologically-inclined person I am greatly disturbed by this.

The days of brute-force controls are gone ("He yanked back on the control stick until his knuckles were bleeding ..."); all is controlled through electrical signals, as are most of your motor-car controls - certainly the steering and gear change mechanisms.

Why then can we not detect pilot failure (as we do for railway locomotives) and assign a test-pilot to land the airplane? Or a robot for that matter?

When Things Have Gone Wrong, why do we rely on plastic oxygen masks dangling in front of a comatose pilot? How frustrating is it for a trained jet fighter pilot to watch helplessly from fifty feet away, knowing that he'd have a chance of a landing, if only he could obtain the controls. And yes, I know that a fighter jet is different from a passenger jet. Haven't you ever fantasized that you'd be the heroic passenger who gets instructions from the control tower and saves lives?

Where are the gizmos that allow us to shut off car engines wirelessly? Why aren't we controlling airplanes remotely, especially in times of incapacity?

I bet that the answer this time is economics, not legal-political. There is a price to retrofit low-cost remote controls on every paid-passenger aircraft, and the price will be huge in terms of dollars. It can't be a serious legal-political problem. The U.S. alone ought to be embracing this as an anti-terror option. "You can't steal our planes, because we hold the remote control".

You are a passenger on an airplane. You've learned or reasoned that the pilots are dead or unconscious. How do you feel about a trained test-pilot half-way around the world bringing your ‘plane in to land on a long runway by video-control, with emergency personnel standing by?

Better than making another hole in another mountain, I bet.

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