Comment by Voloskaya
1 day ago
> sometimes act unreasonably. Intent cannot be determined without clear evidence or statements because that's now how thoughts locked away in people's minds work.
By this logic it would be impossible to ever find anyone guilty of murder (or any other nefarious action) with intent unless they explicitly state that it was in fact their intent. Obviously this is not how justice works anywhere, because at some point you have to assume that the overwhelmingly most likely reason for doing an action was the true reason.
If someone pulls out a gun, cock it, aim it at someone and pull the trigger, killing the other person, should we hold off any judgement because they might have done it purely mechanically while in their head thinking about the lasagna they are going to cook tonight and not realizing what they were doing ?
The fuel cut off switches have a unique design, texture and sequence of action that need to be taken to actuate them, they don’t behave like any other switch. Pilot are also absolutely not trained to engage with those particular switches until it’s instinctual.
Courts do not seek to establish the truth. They aim for a reasonable balance between false positives (innocents convicted of crimes they didn't commit) and false negatives (criminals allowed to go free). In practice, the false positive rate is probably around 5%, and innocents go to prison all the time.
Air accident investigations mostly deal with one-in-a-billion freak occurrences. Commercial aviation so safe and reliable that major accidents rarely happen without a truly extraordinary cause.
Yet Occam's razor still applies
That's not what Occam's razor means. It means that after you have exhausted all options to rule out competing hypotheses, you choose the simplest one that remains, for the time being.
Consider some explanations that are consistent with the evidence presented so far. And remember that the purpose of the investigation is to come up with actionable conclusions.
1. One of the pilots randomly flipped and crashed the plane for no reason. In this case, nothing can be done. It could have happened to anyone at any time, and we were extraordinarily unlucky that the person in question was in position to inflict massive casualties.
2. Something was not right with one of the pilots, the airline failed to notice it, and the pilot decided to commit a murder-suicide. If this was the case, signs of the situation were probably present, and changes in operating procedures may help to avoid similar future accidents.
3. One of the pilots accidentally switched the engines off. The controls are designed to prevent that, but it's possible that improper training taught the pilot to override the safeties instinctively. In this case, changes to training and/or cockpit design could prevent similar accidents in the future.
Because further investigation may shed light on hypotheses 2 and 3, it's premature to make conclusions.
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