DON’T BLAME EVERYTHING ON THE PILOTS. That’s the second headline, the one you won’t likely hear on most news reports.
The NTSB said the pilots made a series of mistakes, but underlying those mistakes were “the complexities of the Boeing auto pilot system”. That is part of the trouble with any automated system: when you come to depend on it, how do you adjust your own actions when it doesn’t do what you expect it to do? Another question is this: why is there a setting on the auto pilot where it ceases to perform its main functions, but is not otherwise turned off?
You can fly the aircraft through your own eyes in this animation provided by the NTSB and presented here by http://terryreport.com as a public service.
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