I've continued to follow flight crash investigations, and I'm finding that flight computers are now always implicated in crashes--even in cases of mass murder by pilot, it's the flight computer that flies the aircraft into the ground--as if the suicidal pilot himself lacks the nerve to keep a hand on the controls all the way to impact. The response of the pilot when a computer starts to crash his plane is thus crucial; however, to date it doesn't appear that pilots are being trained to fight with their computers, and in one crash report after another I read of the confusion of the pilot as to why his control inputs aren't working.
So definitely, pilot training needs to change. Flight simulators need to teach the problems of computer takeover, and, since I'm reviewing accident reports from years ago, this process may well have already been begun. But there's one more thing: when an engine begins to self-destruct, normal procedure is for the flight crew to try to re-start the engine. This is madness: they should be focused on finding the nearest safe place to land, engineless. All commercial aircraft should have backward-facing cameras with monitors in the cockpit that visually show each engine. Thus if an engine can be seen to be aflame, or flying apart, no attempt should be made to restart it. All attention should be focused on getting the plane down safely.
And, I suppose, given the inevitable continuation of takeover by computer, flight computers should be programmed to pull up the aircraft any time they are programmed to fly it into the ground--or at the least, unlock the cockpit door authomatically any time a terrain warning goes off.
