From the article: it "was flying at 2,000 feet".
I see no reason to assume it would have any ground-avoidance software besides flying higher if it detects it's near the ground.
I see no reason to assume it would have any ground-avoidance software besides flying higher if it detects it's near the ground.
Now say the go-down routine gets abnormally high importance, or fires off a million times per second.
Unlikely? Yes, but so is what happened. And I specifically included "consider if", because it's not what happened, but could conceivably, and was probably one of the panicked fears going through their heads.