Ask HN: Could dual pilot input help prevent Air India-like crashes?

1 point·amichail··4 comments

Maybe jetliners should require simultaneous physical input from both pilots for all sensitive switches, as a way to protect passengers from intentional actions by a single pilot.

In other words, both pilots would need to toggle their copy of a dual switch at approximately the same time.

Do you think this would be a reasonable safety measure?

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Based on articles and videos by people who are pilots (or experts), crew attention already a badly overstretched resource in the cockpit. You'd be forcing the other pilot - who may be busy talking to ATC while working a major checklist and looking at thunderstorms on weather radar and more - to mentally jump out of all that and help adjust some "sensitive" controls.

In an airplane, there are a lot of "sensitive" controls.

I'd bet that such a change would cause more disasters than it prevented.

Here’s how that goes:

13:01 UTC: Pilot flying has heart attack.

13:02 UTC: So does pilot monitoring, after realizing he can’t move the throttle or put down the gear.

Two people exist for redundancy… when one fails, the other IS the safety.

How you prevent unauthorized intentional movements of vital switches is you pay people really well and give them lots of rest and very good psychological support systems.

What if an input is required to prevent a crash and one pilot maliciously does nothing.

I think there is a point in life when you just have to trust or the complexity and failure scenarios explodes.

By the way I have a similar feeling about software supply chains. You can do a little but there is a point it becomes futile.

Maybe add a pop-up dialog box- "Are you sure you want to crash the plane?".

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