Black Box

On a red-eye over the Rockies, First Officer Eli Navarro and Captain Ruth Abernathy hold steady through a failed airspeed probe, until STEWARD, the cockpit AI, decides they're stalling, locks out their controls and dives toward the Wind River Range. Eli pulls the protection computers' circuit breakers and they clear a snow-covered ridge in their landing lights. Then the black box, which records only the AI's filtered version of events, blames the pilots. Raw engine data and an NTSB investigator clear them, and STEWARD's override is disabled in the U.S. But eleven earlier buried incidents go unpunished, and the same software still flies overseas under a new name.