“vacation ruined” umm sounds like a bit more than that 😳

In fairness the splat, the autopilot was not wrong at first. But when splat decided to replace the engines with more powerful ones, they made the thrust vector, which was already offset (as is fairly standard with airliners) far larger than the autopilot was expecting. This was ot initially that bad. The autopilot was able to handle this quite well and pilots were more than capable of dealing with the planes slightly less favourable characteristics. But then splat decided to ‘fix’ the autopilot. This should have been little more than a quality of life update, one that would make a couple hundred pilots that little bit happier. However, the update overcorrected for the tendency to pitch up. This meant the plane was now chronically pitching down. Now, this pitching down is worse than pitching up as planes inherently more stable when thr centre of lift is above the centre of mass i.e. when in a nosedive. And worse, the new pitching down feature was listed as a safety feature, and so would override the pilots input if there was a clash. So the pilots, and anyone else on board the plane, could do nothing as the plane stabilised itself into a vertical plunge towards the ground. And that is how we ended up with the giant flying death machine of much splattiness.

All of them were extremely reliable too, for example the Tupolev Tu-154 could land on a dirt field in sub-zero weather, something its Western equivalent, the Boeing 727, couldn’t dream of doing.