Rick Adams chaired the pilot training stream at WATS 2024, witnessing a shift towards the science of learning in aviation training, with a focus on data analysis, AI, and VR applications.
on that, any pilot will tell you. to control a plane. in kind of dive at that kind of speed takes a lot of energy. it takes a lot of skill. somebody s hands were on the wheel making that plane go down like that. and that is what is disturbing. there have been a number of crashes in the past where, you know, you zero in on pilot behavior. the german wings accident, the egyptair accident, both of which i worked on, and the silk air accident. i m afraid the early evidence on this accident points, that you will do a hard look at the flight crew. yeah. and of course right now, it is just speculation. we don t have anything confirmed. we re waiting for more facts. there will be an investigation. tell me what investigators will be looking at and looking for, exactly. well, the first question that will be presented to the chinese
describing it. smoke. and another thing it shows us, it s clear, sort of a slightly cloudy, but not some major storm condition. i checked the weather. it says about 10 a.m. it was about 70 degrees, winds of about 8 miles per hour so it doesn t appear that there was some major storm or anything like that. does that tell you anything? it suggests remember, ed, we re very early into this. things like wind shear and a loss of visual reference, it appears, will not be a player. so, it may come down to the other two factors, mechanical and human and of course, regrettably we know that an aviation siteologist, so a lot of times it does come down to the pilot behavior, but i m only speculating though and that s why the board will take upwards of a year, probably, to
we don t know how lax malaysian pilots are when it comes to cockpit door security. that s still up in the air. there s many unanswered questions about what might have occurred in that cockpit that still we re guessing at right now. a foreign affairs reporter with washington post, you ve done quite a bit of investigating in terms of pilot behavior when it comes to pilot suicide. we don t have a lot of examples of that. how would you relate that to this new information. actually, what you just said right now, there are not a lot of cases of pilot suicide. there s only been 24 cases in the last two decades of known pilot suicide. what we ve heard now, post 9/11 it was known a lot of airlines tried to change cockpit doors in some ways to mitigate against risk of hiking. what was said malaysian airlines does have rigorous standards for
one is many airline pilots are obsessed with flying. they just love flying. this captain was putting his simulator on facebook. so that s just sort of, i would call, it normy nerdy pilot behavior. that doesn t raise a flag to me. he had a pretty elaborate simulator for this home. to plan a flight to some destination other than the intended destination of beijing, it s not difficult. it wouldn t really take a lot of practice at all. if he had decided to divert it. also, you know, the fact that the data was deleted. i mean, i hope this is some valuable evidence. but, you know, it s like deleting an e-mail. that s right. how much do we all delete stuff in all of our various electronic devices. it may not be significant. but again a new piece of information that we learned this morning. all right. what about this news overnight, steven that flight had been reprogrammed. new waypoints put in before the