Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya says the next frontier in aviation safety is protecting passengers "from the pilots," urging regulators to accelerate cockpit automation and real‑time supervision systems.
What Happened: In a post on X, the Social Capital founder wrote that after decades spent shielding travelers from mechanical failures and hijackers, "the only risk that is left is pilot error or sabotage. We need more supervision/automation that protects the plane and passengers from the pilots. It's a narrow failure mode that is unrecoverable but totally avoidable."
Accident data support his first claim. The fatal crash rate for commercial jets has decreased by roughly 65% since 2005, as avionics and automated flight management systems have improved, according to the FAA and Boeing.
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Palihapitiya also argues that hijacking fears have ebbed. Security historians concur. More than 130 U.S. flights were commandeered between 1968 and 1972 as per a WIRED report, while only three hijacking attempts were recorded worldwide in 2021, none fatal, Our World In Data shows.
Why It Matters: Palihapitiya’s call arrives days after the FAA and Boeing both insist the Boeing 787 Dreamliner's fuel‑switch locks are safe, releasing internal analyses that call the design sound and not in need of an airworthiness directive, even after preliminary findings linked last month's Air India crash in Ahmedabad to a fuel cutoff by one of the pilots.
India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau found that both engines on the Air India Boeing 787 lost power when their fuel‑cutoff switches were flipped from RUN to CUTOFF one second apart. Investigators say this fuel supply cut contributed to the crash that killed 260 people.
Human factors remain the chief cause of accidents, the International Air Transport Association's 2024 report notes. French Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority investigators found Germanwings Flight 9525's 2015 crash, which killed 150, stemmed from the co-pilot deliberately descending into the Alps.
Similarly, suspected pilot error led to the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999, which certain theories attributed to pilot suicide for the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) in 2014.
Yet excessive automation can backfire. The 737 MAX crashes that killed 346 people in 2018‑19 were tied to software that overrode pilot commands, prompting fresh calls for better human‑machine balance.
The billionaire has previously touted driverless technology as a way to slash road deaths and echoed that optimism for aviation.
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