SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
BBC reports the co-pilot of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the Alps intentionally locked the pilot out of the cabin and initiated the flight's descent into the ground:
The co-pilot of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps, named as Andreas Lubitz, appeared to want to "destroy the plane", officials said.
Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin, citing information from the "black box" voice recorder, said the co-pilot was alone in the cockpit.
He intentionally started a descent while the pilot was locked out.
Mr Robin said there was "absolute silence in the cockpit" as the pilot fought to re-enter it.
Air traffic controllers made repeated attempts to contact the aircraft, but to no avail, he said.
The story seems SN-worthy because it is an object lesson in the consequences for our lives when we put complex machines and systems into the hands of others. In this case it was a trained pilot who killed a plane full of people who were powerless to stop him. Another example could be engineers who sabotage a dam and wipe out entire communities downstream. We mostly don't think about stuff like this because there is an invisible web of trust, sometimes called a "social contract," that leads people to get on a plane, or go to work, or take their kids to school without giving it a second thought. But when that social contract unravels, all bets are off...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2015, @04:38PM
> Another example could be engineers who sabotage a dam and wipe out entire communities downstream.
Is that made up? I have a hard time believing that dam construction, which is a collaborative effort, would be subject to deliberate sabotage by the builders. It would require the coordination of a lot of people for deliberate engineering flaws to go unchecked. Cheapness and corner-cutting, absolutely. But deliberate sabotage seems like it would be essentially impossible to pull off.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday March 26 2015, @04:42PM
I guess that in this case it's not during construction, but in the aftercare of the pipes and infrastructure.
Throw a spanner into one of the turbines for example (although I know that can't actually be done)
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Thursday March 26 2015, @04:56PM
It has already happened:
Val di Stava dam collapse 1985 [wikipedia.org]
"An investigation into the disaster found that the dams were poorly maintained and the margin of safe operation was very small."
Vajont Dam 1963 [wikipedia.org]
"when the designers ignored the geological instability"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2015, @05:19PM
Those are cases of negligence, not sabotage.
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Thursday March 26 2015, @07:28PM
I would disagree. The decisions involved were not just a mistake- it was deliberately allowing the dam to fail to increase profit. Sabotage for financial gain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2015, @07:52PM
By that logic every act of negligence is sabotage because negligence is always the result of caring about something else more.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday March 26 2015, @10:28PM
Not necessarily. Negligence can be due to laziness, stupidity, or greed. Often a mix is involved but there comes a tipping point where it would be hard to NOT know a failure was the inevitable result. Once it gets to that point, it becomes sabotage.