One Hundred Seconds of Confusion: The crash of China Airlines flight 140
On the 26th of April 1994, a China Airlines Airbus A300 was on final approach to Nagoya, Japan when it climbed steeply, stalled, and plunged suddenly to earth, slamming belly-first into the ground beside the runway with a great burst of flame. Although rescuers rushed to the scene, the aircraft had disintegrated utterly, and from the shattered fuselage just seven of the 271 passengers and crew would emerge alive.
The crash turned out to be the bleak apotheosis of a prior series of near misses involving unfavorable interactions between humans and automation on Airbus A300 flight decks. In each case, some seemingly minor trigger escalated into a complete loss of control because the pilot and the autopilot began fighting each other, only for the human pilot to win a pyrrhic victory, leaving the aircraft in a dangerous and precarious configuration. The extent to which these events were connected, as well as the allocation of responsibility, became major subjects of debate among experts assigned to the case, and because no accident ever has a single cause, it would be equally inappropriate to say that there was one right answer. But the story of China Airlines flight 140, and the final 100 seconds in which it went awry, nevertheless hold valuable lessons as a sobering example of the fatal feedback loop that can develop when pilot and plane find themselves on radically different trajectories.
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