As the wreckage of Air India Flight ... cools on the tarmac of ... airport, a quiet but urgent investigation is gathering pace.
British air accident investigators have joined the renewed technical analysis, looking to answer six haunting questions that remain unanswered. This is not a search for blame. It is a desperate attempt to ensure that what went wrong never happens again.
The questions range from the mundane to the deeply technical: Was there a previously undetected fault in the flight control software? Did a routine maintenance procedure overlook a critical component? Could a transient power surge have corrupted the avionics?
And crucially, why did the cockpit voice recorder stop two minutes before impact? The answers lie in a forensic examination of the black boxes, now being studied in a secure lab in Farnborough. The investigators are using machine learning algorithms to sift through terabytes of data, searching for patterns that the human eye might miss.
This is the new frontier of air crash investigation. But with each algorithm we deploy, we must ask: Are we trusting machines to solve a problem that a machine might have caused? The irony is not lost on those who understand the 'Black Mirror' implications.
We are looking for a needle in a digital haystack. And if we find it, we must be ready for the uncomfortable truth it reveals.
