But, due to a lot of effort in making better educational material available for pilots, including better flight simulators and better simulator scenarios, flying is a lot safer than it was in 1958.
At the risk of being a stereotypical American liberal, I'll point out two significant reasons flying is safer than it used to be in the US are Federal regulation and post-accident lawsuits. If there were an organization like the FAA that had the power to "ground" AS17557 until their network engineers completed a week's refresher course, there'd be significantly better change management techniques in play. If YouTube were currently suing Pakistani Telecom for eighty-seven gazillion dollars-- and were widely considered a lock to win their lawsuit-- suddenly a whole lot of other ISPs would magically find the training budget to make sure THEIR engineers didn't expose THEM to that sort of liability. Pilots don't spend dozens of hours in simulators because it's fun, they do it to get/keep their license. American Airlines doesn't spend millions of dollars on pilot (and ground crew) education because they're run by philanthropists, they do it because screwups could cost them orders of magnitude more money. The Internet lacks any such enforcement mechanisms. How many people do you think have lost their jobs for this latest incident? What are the odds that the responsible party lost a penny in revenue or in fines? When there is no financial or regulatory pressure to avoid screwups, avoiding screwups ceases to be a priority at Layer 8 or Layer 9. And then you have incidents like this, where the operational solutions are widely agreed upon and the political obstacles are widely agreed to be insurmountable. And we wait for the next incident. -- Dave Pooser, ACSA Manager of Information Services Alford Media http://www.alfordmedia.com