Upgrade: Manual training to fix over-dependence on automation

Around three hours into its journey from Rio to Paris on June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330-200, headed into an area of severe thunderstorm activity and was never heard from again.

From an envelope-pushing altitude of 38,000 feet, the aircraft entered an aerodynamic stall before plunging into the depths of the southern Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people aboard. Several days later, pieces of the wreckage were spotted floating on the water’s surface, but the whereabouts of the rest of the jet remained a mystery for more than 2 years, until a privately-funded search located the bulk of the fuselage, bodies of the victims, and the vital black box recorders.

Investigators had already solved part of the puzzle, relying on automated messages sent from the crippled plane as it went down, revealing that the pitot tubes that track speed had frozen and malfunctioned, setting off a cascading series of events.

With the wreckage now found, the evidence led experts to conclude the crash was caused by the pilots’ failure to take corrective action to recover from the stall.

The findings cast a harsh light on fly-by-wire technology and its reliance on computers, rather than humans, to make the final call on flight decisions. Boeing and Airbus both use fly by wire, but Boeing gives pilots the ability to override automation. The crash prompted a renewed effort to retrain pilots to manually fly the plane–no matter what the computer is telling them.