Originally Posted by
Gretchenfrage
Right now if you dare blaming any machine, you get grilled and shouted down by the usual crowd, or should i say lobbyists. The machine seems to get away with almost everything, it's always the failure of the human of not having memorised well enough the ways the machine wants to get interpreted and operated.
The last sentence points at a almost philosophical (yes, PJ2), albeit inevitably realistic fact, that at some point even all the manufacturers and regulators will have to get out of their denial mode, pull their heads out of the sand and they will be confronted with only their machine.
Until the machines design build and maintain themselves (at which point it will likely be their world not ours), there will always be a human to blame.
But in this case, you are forgetting, the machine
was blamed, judged and punished - straight after the accident. The AA summarily removed from service and the more capable BA equally damned by association, all long before anyone knew how the pilots had mishandled the situation. In some ways this is unfair on the machine - the limits to its capabilities were already known, previous incidents dutifully reported to its human masters, its designers had already created a more capable replacement, and the aircraft mfr had recommended replacement. All well over a year before the crash.
One airline (at least) however refused/delayed replacement, presumably because some human there thought that that airline's humans in the cockpit could cope just fine with the less capable machine. That turned out to be spectacularly wrong.
So, where does the fault lie in the end ? With the machine that suffered the fault, but was already due for replacement precisely because of that fault, or with the humans who failed to cope with the fault, or with the human(s) who decided the fault was not a risk and could be handled by the other humans ?