Such an interesting way to die. It's always fascinating how complex systems go down.
Yes, I am an engineer and like a lot of engineers I find air crashes to be fascinating once the final reports are complete. I think the fascination may appear morbid to a layperson, but the compulsion is natural to engineers.
Aircraft are among the most complicated and highly engineered systems we have. Safety is built in, redundant, and obsessed over. Yet crashes do happen, and the causes are often very instructive from an engineering standpoint.
I especially find some of the pilot induced crashes of the modern 'fly by wire' type aircraft to be incredibly interesting from a controls engineering standpoint. Human interface with controls systems can be incredibly complex.
You look at how Cptn. Sullenburger deliberately used the A320's FBW system to drag the aircraft into the Hudson River on the verge of a stall and you see how a savvy pilot can use these controls systems to maximum advantage. Could he have crashed an older airplane quite so well? Probably not. OTOH, an Air France flight crew held an A330 in a stalled condition for over three minutes before crashing into the Atlantic ocean mainly because the acting pilot seems to have been unaware that he was operating outside of normal mode. And a Boeing 777 crew seemingly hit a seawall in San Francisco because they did not realize that auto-throttle was not engaged.
All that said, these days crashes are becoming rare. It's never been safer to fly than it is right now, and I have to say the lessons learned from the earlier crashes have made the systems very robust today.
