This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards, which means that most of the times, when something goes wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome and you don't hear about it.

But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic outcome or a very near miss), it'll usually be a tale of many mistakes, very egregious misbehavior, multiple failures etc. - because it generally has to be to cause a bad outcome or even get close to it.

Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad actually happened here. It was a near miss that needs to be addressed, of course, but nobody died, there likely was no serious equipment damage, etc. Ultimately, the system worked.

This is the exact wrong way to think about it.

With substantial experience with managing risk, the most important thing I know is that you MUST UNDERSTAND the difference between managing risk with knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, vs rolling the dice and getting away with it.

With risk management by knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, you can make an ordinary practice of very risky activities very safely.

But when you are rolling the dice and getting away with it, you may get away with it for a long time, long enough to think you are safe, but it WILL bite you, and hard.

"Near misses" are very clear indications that your risk management has a failure mode you didn't account for - and you are now in the zone of rolling the dice. If you do not attend to that, you are about to get bitten.

So, just because no one was hurt or died — this time — does NOT mean you can be relieved.

It definitely was a failure in the sense of "we need to do failure analysis and make sure we don't get this close again", but it also was a success in the sense of "ultimately, something prevented a catastrophic outcome" (and studying that, and potentially trying to replicate those positive aspects at other airports, is also something that should to happen).

The most likely "something" was Pure Dumb Luck, just a random combination of factors that happened to work out favorably. Of course, on the chance that there was some particular factor/event/action that could be replicated and reliably prevent the disaster, then sure, we should have a look.

I'd definitely make a good survey for that, but the focus really needs to be further back in the chain of events to find out what thing(s) failed.

And of course to be in any way relaxed about this because they weren't scraping up parts from 300+ bodies this time is folly.

That this did not happen, and nobody actually concentrated on flying the plane, while the other party went through the corresponding checklists and diagnosis - thats cultural rot and a major issue.

Just because you are [using knowledge, technology, skill, & planning] to manage risk once does NOT mean that the job is done. It needs to be constantly maintained.

If it is not constantly maintained, you are slipping back into the zone of [rolling the dice and getting away with it]. It will bite you.

What comes to mind is the last video from the very experienced skydiver which was normal until chute-opening-time, then got very chaotic and ended - he'd become so comfortable/complacent that he didn't do his checklist, jumped with only a knapsack instead of his chute. I'm sure he started out checking everything well. But getting casual and complacent killed him.

I’m not a pilot (I’m still very scared) and it’s been a long time so forgive me if my language isn’t correct. However, my understanding from that conversation is that this sort of thing is a system failure. Nobody got hurt and there may have been no damage, but they would consider this an overall system failure.

Several people made mistakes here. There was the pilot who made the near fatal entry. And many pilots failed to spot the error. They didn’t perform their pre-flight properly and would have had to forget a checklist.

They apparently didn’t even figure it out when the runway lights changed to signify “you done fucked up.” (Can a pilot weigh in?? Is that an aviation term?) :)

This system failed. It’s pure luck that everyone survived.

Events like this are not Boeing's fault and will continue until foreign airlines can get rid of corruption.

Incorrect! They exposed their pax to unnecessary risk. You do not think like an aviator.

I'm not a pilot but this stuff does concern me.

If you Google around for GPS related accidents with cars the results are pretty mind boggling. There's a number of cases of folks driving straight into a lake because GPS told them to go that way. This plane incident reminds me of that.

"OK Google zoom in the map by 2X"

nope

"OK Google don't hide all the businesses while on navigation mode"

nope

"OK Google show all street labels don't hide them from me"

nope

"OK Google rotate the map to the right 30 degrees for 5 seconds"

nope

"OK Google show me satellite maps instead"

nope

"OK Google pause notifications from Facebook while driving"

nope

... I bet most people have to fiddle with their screens due to OK Google's utter incompetence.

Meanwhile the people on the OK Google team are busy figuring out how to arrange a damn haircut which I never needed.

I've been wondering why we haven't really had any advances in our voice commands for nearly a decade - things like zooming and such are actions I've long wanted to be able to perform.

Even that rotate map.. when your car is shown at the bottom and map is hard locked to current heading, when navigation is about to do a sharp right you end up with zero visibility of the rest of the route as they still haven't bothered doing a projection and modifying rotation dynamically - they're not even trying.

All your examples are exactly the kinds of things that an intelligent system should be able to respond to, in order to be useful.

Getting that haircut ordered is the _last_ thing we need.

I used to run a chatbot that screened people. We thought we were asking simple enough questions, and yet two million chats in, we still discovered at least a Dozen unexpected/misdetected intents that required care. A day. And here is the problem: management will ask: "so if we add handling for 'rotate the map 30 deg', how many people will appreciate it?". The answer is usually "one person every 400k sessions". For an MbA trained manager that means there is no reason to do it. And its the same with every other similar discovery.

Running an NLP based tool requires staffing a 10-20 people full time, telling them to keep the quality high and leaving them the fck alone. Thats anathema for most companies that proclaim to be "metric based". Google is a prime example of this behavior.

But you control that to some extent. If more people are aware of the command and believe it will work (I wouldn't) then you'll probably get higher incidence rates. I wouldn't believe it would work because like the person two parent comments above, less than half the novel crap I try works. So I try novel crap less and less frequently compared to things that I know will work.

Especially that those systems can usually be "proven to work" because they succeed in millions of cases a day.

Wasn't their core business Advertising? Guess they are just not into these sidetracks much.

I just risk a fine and use my hands for a short moment instead of spending 2 minutes being distracted by siri.

The most hilarious example of how bad Siri is for me, is that literally 100% of the time that I'm playing something on Apple TV, if I say "Hey Siri, pause the TV" (or any variation, calling it Apple TV, including the name of the room, etc.) it always replies that there's nothing currently playing. And if I tell Siri on my phone to play on the Apple TV, all it can do is start Apple Music playing a random song on the TV. It can however respond OK to "resume on Apple TV" which restarts whatever I was watching that had been paused.

None of these systems show you enough 'under the hood' to know why it's failing and so react. Clearly, here the voice recognition, tts are working well; some optional visual feedback would be great - like show on screen a list of responses:

- Keyword heard

- OK Google responding

- Voice1 recognised

- Input "navigate home"

- Input sent to maps

- Maps didn't understand

- Reporting failure

I guess Google know all this, at the time of the query, but as they don't know what I'm trying to do (though 'navigate home' is pretty clear, perhaps I was actually saying 'buy a gnome') ... doesn't seem like there's a proper feedback loop to help direct/correct the system?

Say "navigate to X" also can kinda work with less fumbling than typing half the time but it's a bit messy.

Never will I ever tell you what the arterial route you're currently on is called though. Sucker.

All these features work well most of the time, but they all notably fail on, still frequent, edge cases.

This is the crux of the intractable problem of AI/self-driving marketing vaporware, and why until this nonsense is shut down, the situation will probably have to get scandalously worse before it gets better (better meaning regulating fake "self driving" off the road as a public safety travesty).

And for good reason. The main benefit to FSD, as I see it, is the ability to do something more productive with my time while getting from A to B. Most wealthy people end up paying for drivers not because they want an exceptional driver, but because once you reach a certain threshold of income it is more profitable to work (phone calls, laptop, w/e) or sleep, and pay to be driven everywhere than to drive yourself. FSD lowers that income threshold tremendously and could be a significant boon to overall human productivity. If it ever happens.

Seems to miss my point, I may have not stated clearly. Yes I understand the sales pitch of self driving cars stated above...the "marketing" / "hype" of AI/self driving cars/ Tesla FSD evokes the idea of completely offloading the responsibility to the car and doing whatever you want with your time during commutes, as if it was public transit.

But my point was anything less than this is a complete waste of time and useless as a product because until you are completely hands and attention off, you have to be completely hands and attention on/ready...no matter how good or near actual FSD it gets.

Because 99.9, or 99.9999, or 99.999999% effective is effectively 0 percent effective given the catastrophic outcome of any error if you aren't devoting full attention to monitoring the car.

But aside from all of this theorizing, the actual product is NOWHERE near high 9's reliable. As it gets better, attention will drop but errors will still be pervasive. And with this as backdrop, the fact the marketing has ever even hinted at being general-AI type FSD (the name itself for example) is a scandal. The videos of people riding in the backseat, or any other instance of not monitoring the car fully because they think it can drive itself. I predict there's going to a be an endless stream of accidents from these cars then FSD will be shut down until fully proven, which won't be technically possible for a long long time if ever in our lifetimes.

Agreed. If I got a Telsa tomorrow I wouldn't do so with "FSD".

> Because 99.9, or 99.9999, or 99.999999% effective is effectively 0 percent effective given the catastrophic outcome of any error if you aren't devoting full attention to monitoring the car.

I'm not sure what effectiveness you're measuring. There will always be fatal accidents with heavy vehicles moving at high speeds. It's more of a regulatory issue where the accident rate of auto-pilot systems is sufficiently lower than human drivers (because I believe it is already lower in many situations, just not sufficiently lower or ubiquitously lower) and we decide its good enough to no longer require monitoring by the driver.

Edit: I guess its even more complicated than that. Using hypothetical numbers, if the accident-free rate of a human is 99%, and auto pilot is better at 99.9%, but combined (auto-pilot with human monitoring and rare intervention) is 99.999%, can we justify allowing no monitoring in that situation? Can we expect people to follow the law or will it turn in to more of a speed-limit type grey area.

Search youtube videos of Teslas if you haven't seen them yet. The cars will randomly swerve into parked cars, inexplicably steer out of turns, aim directly at medians on the highway. Human errors on average do not equate to this if we want to compare human error "rates" to machine. What is the rate of a random catastrophic error? Machines are way way too high for the foreseeable future, and because of the nature of software bugs they arguably always be higher than humans. The scope of what AI has to be to achieve "general" driving on open-map roads with near infinite variables nearly equates to "general" AI itself.

You can't allow "halfway" monitoring the car. It's all or nothing. It's always monitored or it's not monitored because errors can happen at any time. But anyways, humans aren't robots. Their attention basically not focused if it's not focused completely... multi-tasking is false, and humans already fall asleep fairly easily driving manually. If they have to sit there "focused" but not driving this will lead to even more instances of sleeping or just not monitoring generally.

The numbers are a thought experiment what I mean by effectiveness or mistake or error is just the driver (man or machine) doing something they shouldn't have. Messing up. Humans have very low rates of these mistakes/bad actions/errors. They have very very low rates of catastrophic mistakes. I predict Tesla's won't be 99.anything for a long time. But think of how error-free they have to be to account for the huge domain of roads, signs, weather, terrains, other cars such that when they make their mistakes it doesn't result in disaster... or just "accidents" galore.

https://www.kia.com/au/cars/cerato/features.html

Edit: Ah OP replied. It’s the Kia Forte in the US.

This along with the fact that in my 2020 Toyota Corolla those features can more than likely get you into an accident is the reason I have them turned off. I don't actually feel safe with them on after experiencing their performance. Also notice a stutter in acceleration due to fuel injection timing and response from the gas pedal that concerns me.

Still it is very weird when the car turn the wheel for you with your hand being guided.

No hand up display and not sure if just voice to tell me to drive to lake would I do that.

Say what? Is this some kind of industry joke that I'm not getting?

> The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious health problems

https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-historic...

Asbestos, likewise, was being used 80 years after the discovery of ill effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asbestos_disease_medic...

Radium's danger was known 2 years after its discovery according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium#Hazards

I think your examples support the thesis that we're actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we don't mind them.

But they don't support the thesis that we might find something unpleasant about power electronics that we don't yet know about.

I think it's less that we don't mind them, and more that it unfortunately is a slow process to go from first research realising there's a problem to general scientific consensus to then one or both of public awareness becoming big enough that companies have to respond and stop choosing profit over safety, or government concern needs to become great enough to enforce it through regulation.

I think we're seeing it with plastics at the moment, it seems very likely that in 50 years we'll a) know much more about the harm micro-plastics do and b) look back at now and think "there was enough evidence, why didn't they ban it immediately?" Well, because it's really convenient and cheap, companies don't want to give up profits, people like me don't want to give up convenient packaging etc, and governments don't want to piss off consumers and businesses at the same time by banning it too fast. Similar story for the climate crisis.

Otherwise I agree with what you say, and I'd say it agrees with what I said: we're pretty good at detecting harmful effects, and good at not taking them into account.

But that's not what the parent implied.

And then you have an entire car’s worth just strapped to the bottom of your chassis.

As is standard fuel used in combustion engines (which you know) so how does the argument of flammability hold stronger here?

Ford Pinto blew up due to tank puncture during an accident.

Current fire fighter directives for putting out BEVs is either dump a loader bucket of sand on it (which most don't have yet), or drag it some place safe and let it burn out.

Also gasoline just sits there until ignited. Lithium battery packs can have various failure modes which send them into thermal runaway. Chevy Bolt EVs are being recalled en masse and owners told not to charge overnight or in a garage, least it go off unattended.

I'm very pro EV but lithium is spicy.

Material science improvements won’t overcome the fundamental fact that the third atomic element on the periodic table just really wants to light things on fire.

It's not far removed from flatearthers/qanon/911-truthers/moonhoax people defending theie stance by naming conspiracies thought false at the time but later revealed as true. Such events, and your speculations, are merely examples of the fact that we're sometimes wrong. Not that we should live our lives expecting that every accepted fact is wrong.

If it’s good enough for us (two small cameras and two microphones all mounted right next to each other) why is it inherently infeasible for a computer?

Saying it's just cameras and microphones vastly over simplifies what driving involves for a human.

A fellow named Planck knew, when he used the expression E=hv to describe the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. You just missed class that day, I imagine. Fortunately it's never too late to learn.

Think of how silly this is though. You offload driving to a car, then...demand passenger give absolute attention every second that car operates itself. For one, this is a pointless tool if you have to monitor it all the time. For another, it is impossible that humans will be able to focus their attentions fully when they aren't really doing anything to drive the car. The better self-driving gets (say, safe and effective 99.999% or any incremental level higher), the less the human monitor will actually be watching. Thus the more likely any error will be catastrophic.

I would hope not. :)

Even the failures you see in the beta of Tesla FSD, aren’t catestrophic. The worst I’ve seen is a curb strikes in terms of actual “accidents”

Tesla FSD has many deaths and countless serious accidents under it's belt. Which doesn't necessarily have to be that bad, but as expected a computer doesn't make the same kind of mistakes that a human does and the kind of mistakes that tesla does doesn't inspire confidence (but rather nightmare fuel that you just can't wake up from).

They should be banned until they have level 4 and take responsibility for their cars actions. Blaming it on a human driver and calling it a day is ludicrous.

I think this is particularly problematic because with other humans, we can at least develop a sense of what types of mistakes they tend to make and try to adjust our driving accordingly. Things like not driving in another person's blind-spot, etc. but also more subtle stuff. I feel like there a sort of hive-mind that develops amongst drivers and probably makes things safer than they would otherwise be.

There have been 0 deaths from FSD and as far as I’m aware only 1 crash. Do you mean autopilot? Or navigate on auto pilot?

The car also features a yoke instead of a wheel. Which makes holding the yoke while autopilot is driving almost impossible.

Autonomous driving is a mess.

“Nearly accident” is the same as “not an accident” and definitely not: catastrophic .

This is because drivers are giving 100% attention to monitoring the car in these scenarios. So again, this means the tool is useless (right now it is), or if the driver stops paying attention and becomes an unfocused passenger (the actual point of self-driving) then the tool becomes absurdly deadly.

Everywhere along this spectrum, as attention declines, catastrophic risk goes up. Self driving is vapor ware at best, a scandal at worst. It's not going to end well.

Just like bumping into someone while walking is way less serious than bumping into another car while driving.

Is crashing your car at 50km/h not potentially deadly or dangerous? Of course it is. So, what are you talking about?

When planes typically fly in the air, how many other planes are nearby? 0

When cars drive on the road, how many other cars or pedestrians are nearby? Often many

Just because planes get completely obliterated at the speeds they travel doesn't mean cars going much slower in accidents come out unscathed. This is like elementary school stuff here.

I agree that there is a lot more going on with cars, as traffic and road conditions vary more than air traffic and sky conditions.

But my response is the failures aren’t that bad in the car world. Autopilot (ie lane keep and cruise control) have been probably safer than human drivers. Navigate on autopilot is very stable, but limited to highway… that’s why I referred to the lower speed, because high speed is closer to solved. The hard part of full self driving, is city streets, which is typically lower speeds. The failure mode of FSD is typically for it to just stop… I have never seen a single failure where it full speeds into another object. This did seem to happen sometimes in autopilot in the past, but not FSD

What do you make of this near-miss posted recently? Allegedly, FSD was on when the car veered into the lane of an oncoming car.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/re7vxr/fsd...

As an aside, it seems strange to me that the high beams switch Off as they approach the oncoming car. Seems the driver disabled them… auto disabled would have meant they detected the car, which then seems unlikely they’d move into it’s path. But very hard to judge off camera alone… they might not even be on FSD. Shrug.

of course, in a large sense, the one that hits from behind is at fault, but brake-checking is problematic

The car behind is always responsible for maintaining distance.

Realistically, if the tesla felt squeezed by a car it was passing, going a bit onto the shoulder would have been what I would have expected from a human driver. But no auto steering, tesla or otherwise, is going to do that.

I don't know where you live, but where I live (Denmark) brake-checking is a serious traffic offense which can lead to loss of license. While the driver behind has to keep distance, you cannot brake for non-traffic reasons. I.e. you cannot simply brake-check someone on the freeway because you think the driver behind you is driving too close (also a serious offense).

I don’t know where/why you are attributing sinister motives here… it seems a very understandable motive to make transport better.

It did look surprisingly like a street, but I knew I was in Delft.

We used to have a big pond in the frontyard. One day it was completely covered in duckweed (kroos in dutch) and one of my friends just walked straight into it, not aware of the water underneath.

Glad you didn’t try that out with your car!

https://www.delft.com/routes/delft-waterways-and-the-compart...

I've ridden through Chiang Mai after a heavy rain when the streets were all a foot deep, so you'd get a nice foot wash riding along and despair for your flip flops when stopped.

And if you strayed too far from the car in front or cut a corner, you'd find the 4 foot deep drainage ditches and 12 foot deep canals along the sides of the main roads.

I don't fly, but what I hear from my commercial pilot friends is that many carriers are emphasizing pilots to run on auto-everything so their actual fly-the-plane skills deteriorate. And much worse, the newer generation of pilots never acquired those skills to begin with. due to relying on automation.

The magenta line refers to a line on the display you can just "follow" around that is calculated by the computer.

The video is all about how young pilots are just following around the magenta line and not having the "big picture" of what is going on in their heads.

I can see a longer-than-usual roll-out, but not going rate positive when you are well past V2 and hitting amber runway lights is an unforgivable mistake.

Can confirm. I flew with someone recently who has a very fancy integrated glass cockpit, and shortly after takeoff he turned the controls over to me. The flight director was very clearly giving incorrect indications, turning us onto a track 90° from our intended course, so I ignored it and flew what I knew to be correct before turning my attention to getting the radios set up right. It took an unbelievable amount of arguing to convince the owner that the aircraft was configured incorrectly, and that I was in fact flying the airplane correctly. And all I had to do to notice this was look outside.

> How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding.

Well, training that emphasizes automation rather than manual flying and thinking (an even bigger issue in Eastern countries, see Asiana on SFO) but that carries over to the top levels.

People that train on the subject because it "pays well" or because of fame rather than because they like it.

People that have some other favourable attributes to flying Emirates.

Lack of CRM on the cockpit.

But anyway, these are contributing factors. You could argue that checklist are an automation step and those guys missed it. Apparently 4 people were fired, and I really can't disagree with this.

This reminds me of the (in)famous "take a right" sketch from The Office [1]. Granted, that was a TV show and they were "piloting" a car, not a 777.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY

I think the article was spot on about this - everyone was focused on managing the computers rather than actually flying. I wouldn't be surprised if no one was actually looking out of the window, but instead looking at the screens and wondering why the numbers aren't correct.

The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies.

What does that have to do with anything?

The 777 is a huge aircraft. It has a maximum passenger capacity of 550 people.

If you can have 550 people lives in your hands and are making mistakes like this, it doesn't matter if it's the smallest aircraft in their fleet.

And before anyone bothers to point it out, I know this particular airframe was not configured for 550. But being the smallest in the fleet means absolutely nothing.

The Middle East doesn't have nearly the pool of pilots to start with compared to North America, and even NA is suffering from an extreme shortage of pilots. (Wonder why the airlines no longer fly to your small town? Probably because of a shortage of pilots)

There is a low-paid and debt-heavy portion of the career. However, Medical students aren't paid and even the lowest-paid pilot is making more than the average phd candidate.

Also it's probably easier to get student loans for medicine than it is for piloting.

Maybe the regional carriers should pay more and have better conditions but funny how they describe it as a "pilot shortage". It's just supply and demand.

You can, of course, easily solve the problem by raising wages for regional jet pilots, but it takes a few years for the excess pilots to propagate to the major carriers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_director_(aeronautics...

Insane

Actually doing that is a memory item, intended to be prompted by a "Vr" call from the pilot not flying. As far as I know it's not yet clear whether the PNF gave that call, but the PF certainly waited to rotate until well after reaching Vr. This is where the "sanity checking" appears to have failed, with the PF heeding the misconfigured flight director when it disagreed with other instruments and the situation visible out the cockpit windshield.

The autopilot follows the flight director, and the flight director is dumb.

I'm grossly simplifying but V1 is the point where you go "okay, are we SURE we're ready to go flying, y/n?" Around V1, if there are problems with the plane not conducive to flying (engine failure, fire, control surface malfunction especially), you reject the takeoff. On a loaded/fueled commercial jet you run a chance of tire/brake damage because the braking system will be at nearly its limit, and the heat might cause some of the thermal/pressure fuses in the tires to blow.

At V2, that's where you are going flying whether you damn well like it or not, with the only exception being (I believe?) a loss of control surface authority, because in that case, you're not flying, period. Plane on fire? You're going into the air, because if you don't, you're crashing because the plane won't stop before the end of the runway.

Then there's Vr, the point at which you go flying (rotate.)

Just about the only thing on the pilot/copilot's mind around V1/V2 is "does everything feel / sound / look OK?" and then getting as much altitude as quickly as possible once Vr is hit, because altitude is potential energy. Until you have enough altitude such that your glide distance is enough to circle back to the airport and land, you are completely boned if you lose both engines.

The runway is long enough to handle the plane rolling out from V1 to a stop. That means at Vr you aren't anywhere even remotely close to the end of the runway.

Going into the runoff area, but then also failing to climb at a normal rate even after you've finally taken off, is mind-blowingly incompetent. I would think it would almost be a career-ending mistake for both officers. If the first officer was flying the plane but the captain was PIC, the captain should have taken control a second or two after the first officer failed to rotate at V2.

My guess is that the captain was flying and the first officer didn't speak up; especially on the least desirable route people are looking to get promoted out of that hell, and arguing with the captain often isn't conducive to that. Lot of the captains know each other, and even if you get promoted, you stand a good chance of running into one of his buddies.

Edit: forgot to mention, the plane was likely screaming at them for overspeed on the gear and/or flaps, as well.

V1 is the takeoff abort decision speed; beyond V1, you are going too fast to stop safely in the runway length still available to you. If the plane is on fire and you've lost an engine and the computers and screens all die, but you've passed V1, you are still taking off anyway.

V2 is the safe single-engine-failure climb-out speed. This is the speed you pitch for after rotating, so that you're not flying too slowly that an engine failure would be dangerous.

Vr is almost always at V1 or a little bit higher; by definition, it cannot be before V1 (if you were rotating before V1, you wouldn't have to worry about whether you have enough runway left to not rotate) or after V2 (if you're at your single-engine-failure climb-out speed, you should've already rotated).

The V2 speed is entered into the autothrottle before takeoff (but the autothrottle won't maintain that speed; it will maintain a thrust setting instead). The flight director will command you to pitch up to maintain at least that speed at the current thrust, but only if you've correctly entered an altitude for it to take you up to (which did not happen in this case).

Essentially, they were relying on the flight director to command them to rotate, instead of rotating when Vr was called out. This is a catastrophic lapse in judgment.

Also wonder what kind of training did pilots receive during downtime in COVID to make sure their skills won't decay

The problems that occurred here are neither unique to Emirates nor likely to have anything to do with fake pilot licenses. Over-reliance on automation and complacency are global issues.

this is a training issue, is it not? So related to qualification to some degree