To the best of our recorded knowledge, nobody ran a 4-minute mile in the five millennia prior to Roger Bannister in May 1954[0], but more than 2,000 people have met or exceeded this achievement since. In fact, his record stood only briefly, being bested the following month by John Landy.
The moral of the story? People work in parallel on the same goals, they build on best practice, or sometimes just need to see something is possible (reusable rockets). Having achievements cluster like this is normal and expected.
There was a brief period of time where you could buy your car like this. You'd purchase a rolling chassis from one manufacturer, and commission a coachbuilder to put a body on top. Many premium brands such as Bugatti, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar (Swallow) started in this fashion.
Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.
We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.
As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.
Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.
If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.
The behaviour you describe above only occurred after the pilot flying stalled the plane. There was a procedure for unreliable airspeed indication. Had the pilot flying performed it, the situation would have been resolved without incident.
AF could perhaps be held liable for insufficient training on high-altitude stalls or recognising and responding to reversions to alternate law. But it's hard to see how Airbus can be responsible for a pilot ignoring the most basic first response.
The article from this subthread contradicts this, though. Regarding recoverability of the situation, it says this:
> By now the airspeed indications had returned to normal, but the pilots had already set in motion a sequence of events which could not be undone.
That was before the prolonged stall warnings. But maybe this phrasing is just an embellishment?
But further down, the article is pretty clear that the training was inadequate for this type of unreliable airspeed indication:
> Although procedures for other phases of flight could be found in the manual, the training conditioned pilots to expect unreliable airspeed events during climb, to which they would respond with a steady nose-up pitch and high power setting that would ensure a shallow ascent. Such a response would be completely inappropriate in cruise.
Once the aircraft was stalled there was a narrow window to recover from it, which obviously did not occur. But the stall was entirely caused by pilot input of full nose up! The procedure for unreliable airspeed (which was in both the QRH and the FCOM) was simply to fly a known safe power / pitch from the tables provided in the QRH.
At no time was any of the pilot's Attitude Indicators (Artificial Horizons) inoperative -- all they had to do was maintain straight and level flight at a known power setting and everyone would have come home safely.
I see. I assumed that given they were flying at 37,000ft, they would have more time to react. But the BEA report says that after autopilot disconnection, only two minutes passed until they reached this situation:
> Only an extremely purposeful crew with a good comprehension of the situation could have carried out a manoeuvre that would have made it possible to perhaps recover control of the aeroplane. In fact, the crew had almost completely lost control of the situation.
I had no idea that things could go wrong so quickly, even at that altitude.
You are absolutely correct that things can go wrong very quickly, especially at altitude. Modern planes fly very high for reasons of efficiency, but as the air thins, the window between stall speed and overspeed becomes narrower[0]. That's why piloting always emphasises the need to be thinking ahead of what the plane is doing and not following it.
For this incident, they were flying at FL350 (35,000 feet) and had a service ceiling of FL370 at their current weight -- that's a difference of only 2,000 feet. Within 30 seconds of the autopilot disconnecting, Bonin put the aircraft into a 7,000 feet/minute climb! So that margin was eaten up very very quickly.
If you're interested in aircraft incidents and accidents I recommend Petter Hörnfeldt's excellent YouTube channel Mentour Pilot[1]. He goes into deep technical detail and has covered not just AF447 but many other incidents where the pilot lost situational awareness and put a perfectly working plane into the ground.
> Speedwise the 1MHz 6502 and 4MHz Z80 were on par.
This is a bit of an exaggeration, the 6502 was efficient but not that efficient. While generally understood that the Z80 took 2x-4x ticks to execute instructions as the 6502, in the real world its larger register set meant properly-written Z80 code could avoid expensive, slow round trips to memory.
Outside of artificial benchmarks real world performance shows that the 6502 is roughly 2x as efficient per clock cycle as the Z80[0], i.e. a 1 MHz 6502 is approximately equivalent to a 2 Mhz Z80.
This is reflected in the computers of the day, i.e. TRS-80s were not being blown out of the water by Commodore PETs.
I completely understand the sentiment you're expressing here, however if it helps the language you see as a monolithic invader underwent exactly the same process, more than once. If you could go back in time, no doubt a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon would bemoan the influx of Norman French replacing perfectly capable English (Germanic) words.
News outlets around the world continue to misreport this particular phenomena. Demand for air travel is highly elastic. As airlines raise prices to cover the increased cost of fuel, they are cutting capacity to ensure their load factors remain in the profitable range.
This post links to the incorrect article. From the correct one [0]:
> The Dutch airline said: "This concerns a limited number of flights within Europe that, due to rising kerosene costs, are currently no longer financially viable to operate. There is no kerosene shortage."
I can walk down a Bangkok street in my suit and be comfortable. Why? Lightweight Italian wool fabric, silk-lined jacket, cotton shirt. Meanwhile the guy next to me in short sleeve polo and jeans is a puddle of sweat.
Synthetics definitely have their place. Uniqlo's Airism is a game-changer in the tropics and lots of outdoors activities like hiking or skiing are much more comfortable with modern technical fabrics, but natural fibres are far from obsolete.
The moral of the story? People work in parallel on the same goals, they build on best practice, or sometimes just need to see something is possible (reusable rockets). Having achievements cluster like this is normal and expected.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile