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​Ahmedabad plane crash on June 12, 2025:

This is an incident in which everyone ought to have applied her mind with sense of pain how such tragedy happened and how it can be prevented in future. But vested interests seem to be building up a narrative that two pilots who are unfortunately no longer in this world, cut off fuel supply either deliberately or accidentally. The purpose seems to create a belief that the aircraft was safe and it was a human mistake. For this purpose, they are duly supported by interim report of the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) which reveals partial conversation between two pilots. My bigger concern is that general public is now a days being shown pleasant dreams about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Every mobile phone manufacturer is advertising that its product contains AI features. Well, my personal experience about use of AI is not that optimistic. It has sometimes lead me astray. Personally, I am not in favour of subjecting our natural intelligence to AI. Natural is natural, just as powder milk is not a complete substitute for the mother’s milk. The AI at present is susceptible to algorithmic bias and failure. There is no targeted legislation in India about its risk evaluation and to determine product liability. The incident of June 12 needs a dispassionate consideration how man-machine collaboration has failed.

What is the role of software in this tragedy or was it deficient to prevent it? But vested interests are trying to smokescreen the things. The fact is that there are some past incidents which happened due to technology failure. Additionally, Boeing company has shown design of the fuel supply switches to prove that it is not possible mechanically that knobs of the switches drop down without the intervention of human act. Theoretically, it is quite a plausible explanation. But the fact is that aircraft was a highly sophisticated design of man-machine collaboration to make it a “Dreamliner”. The aircraft consisted of mechanical system, electrical system and above all software driven control system. Let us assume for a moment that fuel supply knobs cannot automatically drop down like Miniature Circuit Breaker (MCB) in our household wiring system, and it is the pilots who did it, accidentally or intentionally. They were bent upon to do a suicidal act! But the question is, should there not be a software driven safeguard in the aircraft that once the aircraft has taken off, fuel supply cannot be cut off even manually? It can only be reduced gradually to bring the aircraft down to the ground, rather than dropping down like a stone. This question and related questions need serious thinking.