Originally Posted by
samh004
If they lost key systems and/or engines, a small rotor is automatically deployed to give them (limited) manual control isn't there?
Assuming they didn't lose a lot of altitude immediately, they'd still then need to glide to safety somewhere, which isn't what you want to be faced with over the sea I'm sure.
My fear is that the computers which control the flaps/control surfaces were affected, thus the plane would be uncontrollable regardless of if the engines were still running or not.
Usually aircraft have redundancy of just about everything. There's usually a chain of mistakes that happen to bring a modern aircraft down. Most failures are little more than a PIlot REPort upon landing.