Planes still fly
An interesting article in the New York Times today written by a freelance reporter that happened to be on board the small private jet that hit the 737 in Brazil the other day. Amazingly enough, the small Embraer made it safely down to a nearby runway, even though a big piece was chunked from the wing. Everyone on board the Embraer was fine. Not so the passengers in the larger plane. The 737 went into an immediate death spiral, hitting the Amazonian jungle and killing all 155 people aboard.
The description by Joe Sharkey is amazing. He is one of the few people who have ever survived a mid-air collision.
I don't like to fly yet I do it all the time. The main reason that I'm nervous about flying is because I am a technologist and thus shocked that these things even work. Think about it: how many engineers, computer programmers and project managers worked on that plane? How many millions of lines of code are required to keep it operational? All it takes is one bad day for one worker and a rivet might be put in wrong, right enough to pass safety checks, but still flawed. Maybe the navigational software is glitched, but only when you cross zero degrees latitude (don't laugh--it happens). My God, WHAT IF THE PLANE IS RUNNING WINDOWS XP?
It's amazing that planes fly. Thinking about this accident and realizing that this is about as bad as it ever gets--a screwup causes a collision--makes me proud of technology. It's great to realize that even with all of the human frailities of the many people involved in getting that jet into the air, somehow we've created enough quality control to compensate. Not only could that jet fly, but it got clipped and landed safely--and in the rain forest no less.
There's hope for technology yet.
Posted on October 03, 2006