It’s easy to get disoriented and accidentally accelerate into the ground, yes, (which is basically the procedure in a stall to get lift back anyway) but based on the ATC recording they knew what was going on and just dropped out of the sky.
The pilots were trying to save the plane up until the last moments. They declared an overspeed condition soon after they ran into trouble, so they were aware of it, but did not intentionally cause it.
And if they were so iced over that control surfaces weren't responding and the wings were no longer generating lift, at that point they were well past the "Anything we do is going to have any effect whatsoever on the future" point.
I don't intend to listen to the audio. Second-hand, it sounds as though they did absolutely everything they could after hitting the cell, and the only way to have avoided this whole situation was "Don't fly that route that day."
... a problem that, in general, we see more often in private-jet and single-engine aviation than commercial-carrier aviation. Far more incentives to make a really, really bad call... And when the bad call happens, the Venn diagram of victims and responsible parties tends to have a lot more overlap, so there's, practically speaking, fewer consequences to discourage such bad decisionmaking in the future (can't meaningfully punish the dead, and the dead can't learn from experience what a bad call "smells" like on the lead-up to it).
I don't agree they had no way to avoid this. Every accident is a chain of mistakes, gaps or mechanical issues. We don't know the whole story here, but I do know that planes of this class are not given up for dead when they hit a surprise weather system. If they are, that means they missed something earlier - weather radar was misinterpreted or a bad judgment call was made.
The Mach tuck recovery is counter intuitive, and could lead to further overspeed and forces exceeding design tolerances.
Another possibility is flutter. I read overspeed and icing mentioned by a pilot in the transcript. Therefore I think of those two elements conspiring in an edge case resulting in forces exceeding design limits, something broke, and made recovery impossible.
But anyway, the investigation will likely answer these questions.
agree. some other forums have alluded them losing their horizontal stabilizer (based off it not being in some stills of the plane crashing) - so the something broke case may also be a big element.
When we created battle.net at Blizzard for Diablo, there was a bug where the game would launch in full-screen mode and hang, and the only way to escape back to the Win95 desktop was to click the ad displayed by battle.net.
We weren’t aware of this.
The ad company we used notified us of this issue and gave us three days to fix it. Afterwards our click-through rate went from something like 3% to .25%.
Many of those "accidents" are not really accidents: I've seen two kinds of ways sites engineer those "accidents"
(1) many sites, like phys.org, have crowded and confusing layouts that try to trick you on clicking on an "x" or something to close an ad but really clicking on the ad, there's a lot of deniability on this on mobile where the touch accuracy is poor
(2) a few years back there were a lot of sites which seemed to always change the layout when you were trying to click on something in the sidebar, anandtech was one of the worst, i could swear they were watching the mouse events and predicting the click events. this stopped all of a sudden, could be Google put the smack-down on this behavior
Ah okay, I had misunderstood you as referring to like, bot farms or something, not developers going out of their way to make it easier for people to accidentally click
Peak performance alone will not imbue something with a soul, and adding (or adding additional) computers frequently seems to overlap with something becoming more soulless.
An SSD is faster, but a hard drive ticking away is a language its own, and an amorphous white-by-default Tesla Plaid may be one of the fastest cars on any road, but odds are the only feeling it evokes is "This is faster than any reasonable person needs, and likely more than is safe for any standard American motorist to be able to just go out and buy"
> a well designed program will not have any bugs or unforeseen failures at al;
You can only say that of either a very simple program or perhaps one with formal verification (which is overkill for 99.99% of software that gets written).
Look at the Linux kernel, arguably a well designed system (unless you ask Tanenbaum) with top notch developers, and still is full of bugs and security holes.
I agree with your general sentiment on bugs. Id personaly go one step further and say:
Every system in the world has bugs and security holes. If its exists, its buggy because "bug" is very loosely defined as "doesnt exactly work as expected". The security topic is even more complicated.
But I also would like to point out that comparing the Linux Kernel quality and development to Claude Code is surely a joke. The former is an ocean of features, compatibility and history. The latter, in the end still one executable CLI tool calling endpoints.
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