Comment by dullcrisp
17 hours ago
So flying in a plane you built yourself is in fact safer than flying commercial because the motivations line up. Got it.
17 hours ago
So flying in a plane you built yourself is in fact safer than flying commercial because the motivations line up. Got it.
You, an engineer at a major aircraft manufacturer that isn't Boeing, have been working after hours with some of your colleagues on a hobby project to add some modern safety features to an older model of small private plane, because you regard it as unsafe even though it still has a government certification and you got into this field because you want to save lives.
Your "prototype" is a plane from the original manufacturer with no physical modifications but a software patch to use data from sensors the plane already had to prevent the computer from getting confused under high wind conditions in a way that has already caused two fatal crashes.
Now you have to fly somewhere and your options for a plane are the one with the history of fatal crashes or the same one with your modifications, and it's windy today. Which plane are you getting on?
This example is so right. Including the parallel with what happened with those two aircrafts.
Definitely not the untested code I wrote myself!
Are you kidding me? How many times have you unwillingly introduced bugs into a code base you didn’t fully understand? That’s basically table stakes for software engineering.
> Definitely not the untested code I wrote myself!
Nobody said it was untested.
> How many times have you unwillingly introduced bugs into a code base you didn’t fully understand? That’s basically table stakes for software engineering.
Which applies just the same to the people the company hired to do it, and now we're back to "the people with a stronger incentive to get it right are the people who die if it goes wrong".
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Those people on the boeing flights would have appreciated a little more of the correct motivations.
Instead they got McDonnell Douglas'd
As it turns out the motivations matter way more than you might think.
Flying in a plane you built yourself is likely safer than flying in the same model of plane built by a company that assembled it for you using lowest-bid labor while making you sign a twenty page lawyer barf disclaiming liability.
We have decades of data saying that isn’t true. Homebuilt aircraft have much worse accident rates than factory built aircraft.
Are you really comparing an amateur skillset to designs from paid engineers made on a company assembly line with QC?
Why on earth would you think an experimental aircraft made by a hobbyist would be safer?
Why do you think a random person, who is VERY passionate about something, as to invest all the free hours in life to do something, is less skilled that one who just does it because is needed to survive?
Sorry. I would be much more inclined to have something made by somebody passionate about it, as done by some guy that received hopefully some kind of instruction on how to do things and was then left alone.
In this context (GA) we are not comparing Airbus/Boeing with a garage build. We are comparing some small company making 2 seaters with your hangar and maybe 10 certified aircraft mechanics that will help you a lot on the process.
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See my other follow up comment ("same model"). Medical device software development feels much closer to homegrown (or worse) than aeronautical engineering.
You write that as if you have ample experience with codebases of medical devices and I'm going to take a stab at this and say that you don't. Prove me wrong.
You can’t honestly believe that or you wouldn’t be able to function in society.
You can believe it and simultaneously function in society.
We aren't all building our own planes because it's worse, but because it's time consuming. I don't have 20,000 hours to burn learning about how planes work to make my own.
If we magically beamed the knowledge straight into people's heads and also had a matter fabricator, I'd imagine yes - everyone would build their own plane. And it might be safer, I don't know.
Point is, the ideas are not mutually exclusive. You can believe both and still resolve it internally and with the world
3 replies →
My comment rests on the fact that the types of planes you can build yourself are completely different models than the fully assembled models from the likes of Boeing etc. I do agree that a kit 737, if such a thing existed, would be less safe than one off the line.
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