SAN FRANCISCO — Bay Area Rapid Transit engineers are conducting “a comprehensive forensic evaluation” to determine what caused a shutdown of the BART system on Saturday. The Saturday morning outage began about 6 a.m.; service was no…
To much dependence on automation. But it is going to contiue. The almighty computer can do it all? Yeah right! Sooner or later a major computer failure of some business is going to cost a large number of lives. Then the fit will hit the shan. Operators of all kinds are loosing the ability to operate without using computers.
Be it RR dispatchers, pilots, loco engineers, car drivers, and so many others there will be a major failure causing many deaths. Can just here it. “The PTC said it was OK” " so " the 2 full commuter trains could not crash into each other. " " The auto pilot was in control so the plane flew corectly into the ground. " " The computer failed suffocating the passengers" " The assembly line’s runaway should not have hurt persons" “Pilots don’t need training of how to take over if a computer fails” " Why practice flying / driving train/ shutting down a runaway / restarting manually in an emergency / etc ?
Take a look through the Mentour Pilot YouTube channel. Many of your concerns about avaiation actions and procedures will be answered. Putting a pilot in command of a plane is not as haphazard as you are presuming.
Actually in the case of BART, it is not enough.
The BART design was ahead of its time and basically sound, but the technology wasn’t up to the task. Moreover, they are having severe maintenance difficulties because you just can’t buy or replicate most electronics components for ~50 y/o infrastructure. I’m not sure if today’s young EE’s are up to reverse engineering this stuff, much less working under BART’s notoriously distracted management. We’ve had some recent interesting topics about some of the wierd outages they have had, can’t remember how they turned out …