Comment by jcgrillo
1 year ago
So what should we make of these issues described in the article? When, not if, this kind of thing kills people will it be a specification error? Will we blame it on maintenance? Surely it can't be the software's fault!
1 year ago
So what should we make of these issues described in the article? When, not if, this kind of thing kills people will it be a specification error? Will we blame it on maintenance? Surely it can't be the software's fault!
First of all, who got blamed for the 737 MAX? Boeing did. This is one of the few industries where the responsibility does not get easily sloughed off.
Second, 787s have been flying for ~13 years and ~4.5 million flights [1]. Assuming they were unaware of the problem for the majority of that time, their unknowing maintenance and usage processes avoided critical failures due to the stated problems for a tremendous number of flights. Given they now know about it and are issuing a directive to enhance their processes to explicitly handle the problem, we can assume it is even less likely to occur than previously which was already experimentally determined to be ludicrously unlikely. Suing someone into oblivion for a error that has never manifested as a serious failure and that is exceedingly unlikely to manifest is a little excessive.
Third, they should be remediating problems as they arise balanced against the risks introduced by specification changes and against the alternative of other process modifications. Given Boeing’s other recent failings, they should be given strict scrutiny that they are faithfully following the traditional, highly effective remediation processes. It should only be worrisome if they are seeing disproportionately more problems than would be expected in a aircraft design of its age and are not remediating problems robustly and promptly.
[1] https://www.boeing.com/commercial/787#overview
> Suing someone into oblivion for an error that has never manifested as a serious failure and that is exceedingly unlikely to manifest is a little excessive.
I appreciate your point of view. The air travel industry is undeniably safe, moreso than any transportation system ever. By a large margin. On the other hand, it is possible to make software systems that do not have the defects described in the article. So how do we get to the place where we choose to build systems that behave correctly? I don't think we get there without severe penalties for failure.
>The air travel industry is undeniably safe, moreso than any transportation system ever.
I disagree: the Japanese shinkansen bullet train system has never had a fatal accident, except for a single incident 30 years ago when someone was caught in a door and dragged 100 meters. No fatalities from collisions, derailings, etc., ever, since the 1960s. That's far safer than air travel could ever claim to be.
Even other train systems have better records than commercial aviation, in general. Plane crashes are rare these days, but they still happen once in a while, and the results are usually catastrophic.
Are planes safer than cars? Well of course, but that's a really, really low bar: cars are driven by all kinds of morons who frequently (esp. in the US) have little to no training or testing, are frequently distracted, don't have a copilot who can take over at any time, and are frequently operating in a very, very chaotic environment (like city streets). It's truly a wonder there aren't more fatal crashes. But safer than trains in general? I seriously doubt it.
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Elevators would like a word with you.
https://nationalelevatorindustry.org/elevators-escalators-ar...
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> So how do we get to the place where we choose to build systems that behave correctly? I don't think we get there without severe penalties for failure.
What failure? The planes work. This is puritanism.
> First of all, who got blamed for the 737 MAX? Boeing did. This is one of the few industries where the responsibility does not get easily sloughed off.
The whistleblowers dying is coincidental and convenient.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/02/sec...
1. For at least one of the whistleblowers, it was certain not "convenient" because he already managed to go public with the accusation, the lawsuit was filed, and his deposition was already made.
2. I'm not sure how a few whistleblowers dying disproves "responsibility does not get easily sloughed off". If anything, they're getting extra responsibility than is warranted. Every time there's something wrong with a Boeing product, people almost reflexively start posting about how it must be caused by corner cutting by Boeing, or how it's yet more evidence that Boeing it circling the drain. This happens even for planes that's are decades old, have a solid service history, and by all accounts are probably caused by pilot error or improper maintenance.