Comment by WalterBright
1 day ago
> Those switches cannot be accidentally flipped
Yes, unbelievable things can happen. There are crashes where the pilot got discombobulated and a crash resulted.
For another example, there are at least two crashes I recall (and I am sure there are many more) where the pilot pulled back to recover from a stall despite being trained endlessly to push forward to recover. (And they killed everyone on board.) Pilots get confused by what an alarm means, and do the wrong thing. Pilots assume the autopilot is on but they had accidentally turned it off. Sometimes people get crazy urges to do the wrong thing (there's a word for that: cacoethes).
These things are rare, but when there are millions of flights, rare things happen.
Interesting. "Cacoethes" means "malignant" in Greek. I didn't know the other meaning in English.
I cheated and looked up the word myself, and just had to use it!