Turkish Airlines Flight 1951

Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 was a scheduled passenger flight from Istanbul, Turkey, to Amsterdam, Netherlands, that crashed on 25 February 2009 while approaching Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Of the 135 people on board, nine were killed and 86 injured. The aircraft, a Boeing 737-800, stalled on short final and impacted the ground approximately 1.5 kilometers short of the runway.

The accident is a paradigmatic case of out-of-the-loop unfamiliarity and the failure of automation handover. The aircraft's autothrottle — configured in a mode that the crew did not fully understand — reduced engine thrust to idle during approach in anticipation of a flare that never came. The crew failed to monitor airspeed and did not recognize the stall until it was too late to recover. Like Air France Flight 447 and Asiana Flight 214, the accident demonstrates that the most dangerous moment in highly automated flight is not automation failure but the transition from automated to manual control.

The Dutch Safety Board investigation concluded that the crash resulted from a combination of technical factors (a faulty radio altimeter that caused the autothrottle to enter idle mode prematurely), human factors (the crew's failure to monitor airspeed and their confusion about the autothrottle mode), and organizational factors (inadequate training on automation modes and failure recovery). The deeper systems-theoretic pattern is the same across all three accidents: automation that behaves in ways the crew does not expect, a crew that has grown dependent on automation for routine energy management, and a handover moment in which the human is expected to perform a skill that has atrophied from disuse.