Another example of the complexity of life-critical situations in air-traffic control
emerges from an incident on a plane that had a fire on board. The controller
cleared other traffic from the flight path and began to guide the plane in for a
landing. The smoke was so thick that the pilot had trouble reading his instruments.
Then the onboard transponder burned out, so the air-traffic controller
could no longer read the plane's altitude from the situation display. In spite of
these multiple failures, the controller and the pilot managed to bring down the
plane quickly enough to save the lives of many-but not all-of the passengers.
Acomputer could not have been programmed to deal with this particular unexpected
series of events.