The important choice was made elsewhere: flight termination system successfully self-destructed the rocket once it was unlikely to recover from its problem. Th

The important choice was made elsewhere: flight termination system successfully self-destructed the rocket once it was unlikely to recover from its problem. The Wiki quotes an interesting sentence from the official report - "An underlying theme in the development of Ariane 5 is the bias towards the mitigation of random failure." It's fortunate that that bias didn't extend to flight termination system. At the point flight control software intersects with real life, it's better to destroy an expensive rocket than have it rain fiery hell on some random people somewhere else. That principle holds to this day.