Fasten your seatbelts, please [aircraft control]

The most important, difficult and fascinating input to any control/command situation is the human one. It dominates and limits any situation and, in spite of fly-by-wire aspects of modern aircraft control, the pilot situation in a modern airliner is a most interesting subject for study. In a more general sense the factor of control is so important that the most highly-paid personnel in any organization, management, do little else than control albeit in a less `hands-on´ mode than the pilot. For an aircraft failure to be classified as catastrophic, this almost invariably involves large amounts of materials, large numbers on people unfortunate enough to be on board and large sums of money to put things right again. The paper examines if these failures are due to one major failure that subsequently leads to the failure of other components, or if they are due to a coincidence of many things going wrong together which, on their own, would not be hazardous. The paper also looks at a few of the more common causes of failures but emphasizes the human aspect. However, in the case of the Mount Erebus disaster, it was ground staff that were truly to blame in the main though the politicians wanted to point to pilot error because the aircraft `carried the flag´ for New Zealand