OP-ED: Ethiopian crash: The Fourth Industrial Revolution and aircraft safety By Tshilidzi Marwala
In one of the deadliest aviation accidents in recent times, the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed a fortnight ago — just eight minutes after taking off, killing all 157 people on board.
China was the first country to ground this aircraft, less than 24 hours after the crash. It was followed by others, such as the European Union, Canada, Japan and South Africa. What is interesting is that the US did not rush to ban flying this aircraft. Boeing, the aircraft’s manufacturer, is an American company closely linked to the political establishment of the US. In 2018, Boeing allegedly spent $15-million on political lobbying.
If a pilot wants to climb to an altitude of 800m above sea level, the system will make this happen by determining the speed, pitch, roll and yaw configuration schedules. Therefore, for the objective of reaching an altitude of 800m, the system requires information such as the present altitude, speed, pitch and so on. This is because the aircraft cannot climb to a particular altitude unless it knows its present altitude.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is driven by intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. Thus, controllers of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are intelligent, and this makes automated systems intelligent. However, because of this infusion of intelligence into these controllers, these systems are vulnerable to stability problems.
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