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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Without knowing the cause but if I had to guess this looks like pilot error. At least statistically that the leading cause of crashes.

I am surprised pilots still manually land planes. Is the auto-landing feature not implemented well enough? But then it's relied upon in low visibility. So it has to work, they why isn't it used more often?

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From what I understand pilots still practice landing in good conditions so they aren't completely out of practice if something goes wrong and they have to manually land the plane.

The point is that it doesn't help to know that it was a pilot error, because a pilot is human, and humans in the same situation might make the same mistake - and the main goal is to prevent accidents, not to have accidents happening all the time and saying "it was again human error". It boils down to: 1 - Was the "error" intentional? If so, how to prevent someone from doing it again? 2 - Was it a real error, with no intention of any kind? If so, how to prevent that someone makes it again?

> doesn't help to know that it was a pilot error, ... and the main goal is to prevent accidents,

You can't prevent accidents if you don't understand their cause. Saying well we don't know what caused it but we'll just tighten all the screws a bit more and send the pilots for more general training. It just doesn't work that way.

Everything is analyzed and tracked to discover the exact root cause. It can often take many years and then new laws or guidelines are usually issued based on findings.

When visual conditions are enough, pilots tend to do visual approach/manual landing even there is CATIII equipment and airline/pilot certified to do that. It is faster and more economic: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/24275/what-make...

Too soon to tell what the problem was. Possibly there was some other problem in the aircraft that was taking some pilot attention. Give this some time.

Then it would still be pilot error, no? I mean, pilot error doesn't mean that the pilot is to be blamed. It just means that he made a mistake.

Yes, the pilot made a mistake, but no, the cause of the accident isn't pilot error. From the point of view of preventing similar accidents in future, the cause of the accident is whatever caused the pilot to make the mistake.

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