IT WAS a given that numerous complex technical issues would crop up and claim serious attention during the investigations into the terrible crash of AI-171 London-bound flight soon upon take off from Ahmedabad. Though the preliminary report pegged the blame on the near-simultaneous fuel cut-off in both engines, it would be only foolhardy to take that as a final verdict on the accident. For, there still could be various technical issues that may emerge from further investigations in the subsequent times. Some of those issues may even relate to some technological dark-spots whose explanation may not be easy to come by. As aviation engineering experts deliberate over those issues, a very serious debate will rise from the ground about whether the safety software in place in the ill-fated aircraft systems was good enough to issue timely warnings and ensure an anticipatory stall of the engines and the plane’s safe landing. Details of similar mishaps are now coming up in public discourse over the past decade and a half all over the world -- causing much confusion among experts.

 

The fact that the fuel supply to both the engines of the ill-fated plane got cut-off with a second, has led to speculations that AI-171’s pilots were at fault -- as they seemed to have failed to conduct a customary check of the engines and systems before they gave and got a thumbs-up for take off. This speculation, however, has generated a lot of protests from various professional organisations of the commercial pilots. Most of these bodies have insisted that it was preposterous to blame the two pilots on board the plane “since no professional pilot would ever toy with fuel supply”, as their leading lights insist. These bodies have also brushed aside the suggestion that one of the pilots could have committed suicide.

 

This argument, of course, does not seem to carry much sense since the pilot -- any pilot -- would be aware of the responsibility of hundreds of lives of innocent people on board the plane. Every argument, of course, has a flip side as well, and in the subsequent times, all those arguments would spring upfront -- making the probe more complex. It is, of course, logically correct that deep investigations are conducted before any definitive decision is made about the role the pilots of the ill-fated plane played in those dying moments between take-off and crash. Even as various examples of mishaps over the past few years have come up in public domain, questions are also cropping up about the pilots’ skills and abilities were being eroded thanks to an over-reliance on high-level, advanced automation. True, these issues, actually, do not raise any technical points but make investigations unnecessarily complicated. It must be accepted that no matter how advanced the technology could be, some dark spots are quite likely to crop up as machines are quite likely to behave “unmindfully” on occasions with no logical explanation available.

 

In these days of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI-ML), the idea that the machine could evolve a mind of their their own and conduct themselves in a raw and undesirably intelligent manner also may assume some importance. Of course, it is only senseless to jump to such conclusions when the detailed probe into the Ahmedabad air crash are still to take place. It would be wise to wait for the investigations to go to the deepest of possible answers of why things went wrong on that day. During this time, the wisest thing to do is to avoid any bias to take precedence in human thought. Proponents of various lobbies, too, should held themselves back from building biases for or against anything. It is time for modern society to allow technology to look for accurate reasons of the Ahmedabad crash -- so that any future possibilities of mishaps are anticipated and avoided in the larger interest of humanity.