Another 150 souls vanished in little pieces on the slopes of a mountain. Can we prevent such things in future? I believe so and here is how.

All new modern airliners can be flown automatically from take-of to landing. The pilots are there for backup reasons and mostly to alleviate our fear of machines (too intelligent machines maybe). So, how can we use this capabilities without alienating people and with high effectiveness.

We can use the idea of “kill switch” which other industries use where when something bas is spotted you can hit a button to stop a process or in this case to start one.

The main issue in those case is that you can never rely 100% on people. Ill minds can be anywhere as this disaster shown, passengers can go rogue, crew can go rogue and ground personnel can also go rogue. The only way we can solve this is to have anyone, I mean anyone on the plane as passenger, crew member of ground personnel be able to hit a “kill switch” and when that happens the aircraft computers will go in a “land on one of the closest known (pre programmed)” airports and until the aircraft is not safe on the runway nothing in the world can change that in any way.

The aircraft automation will simply land the plane and all the controls on board of the aircraft will simply be ineffective until the aircraft has safely landed on the runway.

The aircraft will send continuously its position parameters and intent to its ground personnel and new destination airport.

Looks a simple use case, but due to the current “psychology” of man must dominate machines some changes should be done to the aircraft in order to allow full automated flights.

Keep in mind that this system must be a specialized one to do one and one thing only, detect a abnormality in the flight path, or being “hinted” by the “kill switch” in order to take over and do a single task only, safely land the aircraft. From the moment it is triggered nothing in the world will be able to disable it or influence it in any way until the aircraft is safely on the ground.

Of course there will be resistance on such a system but I personally feel better if it would exists in the flight I’m on and there is a button just next to my seat which if I push I can get safely on the ground. and yes that will cost me a lot of money but not my life!

Emergency Automated Landing? or EAL?

About Gemanwings disaster: The Guardian