Both pilots became so preoccupied with a burnt-out landing gear indicator light that they didn't notice the autopilot had become disengaged, and crashed into the Florida Everglades.
The recent crash at SFO was caused by mistakenly thinking the airplane was working a different way than it was actually working. The pilots thought the autothrottles were engaged when they weren't and were fixated on trying to land the plane manually; something they hadn't done in a long time.
Which is the sort of problem we'll likely see more of as "mostly autonomous" systems become increasingly common. For example, it's easy to imagine that it will become possible (whether or not we elect to go down that route) to design cars that can be self-driving most of the time but which will require a human to take over in some scenarios. The good news is that those scenarios will presumably be mostly low speed ones--the handoff timeframe pretty much has to be of minute rather than second magnitude--but you could still end up with an increasing number of drivers who have very little actual driving experience.
Consider reading Breaking the Mishap Chain by Peter Merlin [1]. It's a pretty fascinating series of case studies where human error was a primary factor. Chapter 5 discusses the crash of M2-F2 during testing for NASA and the role that task saturation had in the incident.
Honestly, that's not entirely true, and not very respectful to the pilots in that crash.
AF447 was caused (partially) by the pilot's misunderstanding that holding the control stick all the way back was gonna make the aircraft go up at the best rate of climb, and not put the control surfaces all the way back.
The AP (autopilot) was off for quite some time when the crash happened. What was supposed to be on though, as always, is the Airbus Fly-by-wire system in normal law, that is in between the pilot's controls and the actual commands sent to the control surfaces (ailerons, elevators...). This system was off (in it's direct control law, more precisely) due to the pitot tubes sending non accurate data, because of the icing problem. The pilot didn't notice that.
teraflop|11 years ago
Both pilots became so preoccupied with a burnt-out landing gear indicator light that they didn't notice the autopilot had become disengaged, and crashed into the Florida Everglades.
Patrick_Devine|11 years ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
ghaff|11 years ago
userbinator|11 years ago
I definitely remember reading about others but can't find them right now.
Bluestrike2|11 years ago
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Mishap-Chain-Development-Aero...
parados|11 years ago
natfriedman|11 years ago
http://n631s.blogspot.com/2011/11/children-of-magenta-line.h...
StavrosK|11 years ago
Tuxer|11 years ago
AF447 was caused (partially) by the pilot's misunderstanding that holding the control stick all the way back was gonna make the aircraft go up at the best rate of climb, and not put the control surfaces all the way back.
The AP (autopilot) was off for quite some time when the crash happened. What was supposed to be on though, as always, is the Airbus Fly-by-wire system in normal law, that is in between the pilot's controls and the actual commands sent to the control surfaces (ailerons, elevators...). This system was off (in it's direct control law, more precisely) due to the pitot tubes sending non accurate data, because of the icing problem. The pilot didn't notice that.
matznerd|11 years ago