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Better Off On Auto-Pilot
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A Vanity Fair article has details of that Air France plane that vanished from radar and crashed into the Atlantic on its way from Rio to Paris, and it has the disturbing information that two of the three pilots were asleep while the plane hit a storm, and one woke up and yelled "f-ck, we're dead" as the plane went down, according to the flight recorder. They left a very inexperienced pilot in charge while the other two slept; one of those two, the veteran of the crew, got one hour of sleep the previous night because he was with his "travel companion." And they say that he left his post and slept instead of staying on the controls for 15 more minutes because that was just the culture at Air France; they were that cavalier about flying the plane. Worse, had they done nothing, they'd have flown right through the storm; it was the inexperience of the guy at the controls, who pulled the nose up instead of down like he should have, that led to the disaster. You're in the hands of someone else when you fly, and stories like this remind you of how dangerous that can be, and how good most pilots really are, since this is a very rare event. (News.com.au)
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