Comments on: It comes back like a dog with a stick

By: Sam J.

Sam J. — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 08:26:03 +0000

They should have tied into the Inertial navigation system. If a plane is falling it would know and would provide another input that will be on the plane already. The INS would know the angle of the plane and the airspeed in any direction. I have no idea what the standard is in planes but I know they have ring laser gyros in some that are solid state bullet proof and not likely to err.

By: CVLR

CVLR — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 04:09:23 +0000

Bob Sykes: “Boeing is allowed to self-certify, meaning there are no feds double checking what the Boeing engineers did.”

Say what now?!

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 17:08:38 +0000

Not convinced the Feds would have done any better than Boeing, TBH. The actual problem here is accountability and poor design judgment. Crucify Boeing for what they are at fault for, here, hold the airlines responsible for their part, and leave it at that.

The more responsibility and power that you lay off on government, the more diffuse actual accountability becomes. Boeing may have made poor design choices, here; let them pay the price.

That said, I would not rule out the possibility of industrial espionage. This strikes me as something that is subtle enough to be the result of a deniable attack along the lines of the infamous Stuxnet. I would be very curious to know what sort of safeguards are in place, particularly in Indonesia and Ethiopia, with regards to access to avionics. The location might have a lot to do with the crashes; lack of similar failures here in the US might be related to better security for the planes…

By: Bob Sykes

Bob Sykes — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 11:14:33 +0000

Boeing is allowed to self-certify, meaning there are no feds double checking what the Boeing engineers did.

By: Alistair

Alistair — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 10:14:47 +0000

One additional, related point; consider Germanwings 9525
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

Everyone on that plane was killed by a “safety” improvement; the practise of locking cockpit doors to guard against terrorism. All it did was concentrate risk in another part of the system.

By: Alistair

Alistair — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 10:12:44 +0000

Agreed.

I work with Engineers in complex systems. They consistently over-estimate system reliability in the field despite extensive testing.

The one thing that strikes me across their work is that they have little or no concept of “something we haven’t thought of” beyond the test environment; the ‘unknown unknowns’ of Rumsfeldian lore. They certainly have no respect for such. Entirely new faults are caused by their last attempt to fix another fault or improve performance.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:39:51 +0000

I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that the actual cause of failure on these flights is going to prove to be something other than these early hot takes on the whole thing, and more probably due to the fact that the pilots who were flying them were not actually pilots, but glorified button-pushers that were out of their depth as soon as something unscripted happened.

This is the essential problem with all of the attempts to create “expert systems” that can substitute for actual experts. The engineers can only design for what they anticipate to have happen, and the environment is always going to throw unexpected circumstances at the system. Without a real pilot like Sullenberger at the helm, wellllll… Shit’s going to go down. As in, nose-dive into the terrain “down”.