141–150 of 189 posts
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Haven't they already taken some big strides down that direction?
Google Maps doesn't work fluidly on an upper medium tier smartphone. Google search often doesn't find very obvious results which it used to find better in my experience. I feel like Google is already slowly degrading and resting on their old laurels.
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anything that is connected to the flight controls, is too important to sub out (unless you are subbing it out to someone better that you are). making an airplane is a huge endeavor that crosses across many domains. you have to have competency up and down the 'stack'. Boeing does. Maybe this will cause a re-look at outsourcing policies. (edit. yes, this software was not outsourced. but it may add another dimension oth…
It has been mentioned in the article that MCAS was never outsourced. Also it’s unfair to blame the software engineers who are building it to specification. It would be fantastical to assume that Boeing management( the same one ploughing through engineering with bean counting) would give a rats crap about a low level engineer raising a concern.
First, none of the software in question was outsourced to the company.
Second, the Bloomberg article does not describe the problems Boeing had with the software engineers from HCL, beyond a cryptic, "it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly." Was it a genuine misunderstanding of ambiguous language? Was it because the programmers did not have a background in the aerospace problem domain? Or was it because the engineers had a poor grasp of the vocabulary? It seems improper to assume the third situation in the absence of any additional evidence.
Finally, I am not sure what part of "software being outsourced" is considered outrageous. Is there evidence that a software engineer employed by Boeing, rather than by company XYZ, is less likely to produce faulty code? Or is more likely to understand the complex downstream effects of their actions and the equally complex upstream design decisions which informed them? Also, countries don't write code. Companies don't write code. People do. That "India doesn't have a deep background in aerospace" doesn't mean much at the level of individual engineers. I am skeptical that the most highly skilled American programmer has a deep background in aerospace either.
Sorry about the rant: something about the Blookmberg article came across as xenophobic innuendo.
Boeing and the US government recently killed the Canadian aviation industry by putting on 300% duties on our main manufacturer because of a government bailout it received. See: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/us-issues... As a result Bombardier, Canadian's only large aviation manufacturer, was sold to AirBus: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/bombardie... The cause was a Canadian p…
Besides, well, the strong do as they will and the weak endure as they must?
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> its low ground clearance is caused by the need to be able to fit a folding staircase inside the aircraft itself. Which incidentally is the major reason why it is the Ryanair main aircraft.
Are you sure? Does Ryanair actually use the integrated stairs, or do they use staircars? I thought they stopped making 737s with the integrated stairs some time ago? Is Ryanair using old planes?
All Ryanair flights I have witnessed have used the airstairs.
How did Boeing make miracles in civilian aircraft? In short, the the civilian engineers were in charge. And it fell apart because the company, due to a merger, killed its engineering-first culture Uhm, this makes me think about the engineering-first of Google. I wonder if Google will end in the same path...
Companies can come back after the HBS MBAs/bizdevs take over, they must return to product/engineering/creative focused though and it is tough, usually it takes a near failure for the problem to be recognized. Apple survived when Jobs came back and focused on products/engineering/creativity. Microsoft survived post-Ballmer after returning to product/engineering led decision making and power structures. Amazon is top o…
Bit strange how the article seems to blame McDonnell Douglas for all Boeing's current troubles. First, it uhm no longer exists and second the merger was in 1997 - more than two decades ago! The current mess is flying under the Boeing flag one way or another.
I've worked through half a dozen M&As, and I've seen the culture at the bigger partner in some of them change radically, often because the bigger company will promote executives from the smaller company as part of the deal. This really is a thing, and sometimes it's a very bad thing, though I've also seen it succeed wildly.
Executives often don't understand the culture in the companies they lead, or the companies they acquire or merge with. Sometimes they don't even have the luxury of choosing partners on the basis of cultural compatibility.
Boeing and the US government recently killed the Canadian aviation industry by putting on 300% duties on our main manufacturer because of a government bailout it received. See: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/us-issues... As a result Bombardier, Canadian's only large aviation manufacturer, was sold to AirBus: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/bombardie... The cause was a Canadian p…
The duties were also overturned in the end, but not before Bombardier gifted 50.01% of the C-Series program to Airbus so it had a chance of survival. The net result was Airbus rebranded the program the A220, committed to building US-destination A220 jets within the US to avoid tariffs anyways and while they significantly weakened one [small] competitor (Bombardier and by extension Investissement Québec) they massivel…
To be more clear. Bombardier WAS indeed sold to airbus. 50.1% for 1 Dollar.
What is more worrying for Boeing is that a SW fix might not be that easy to implement. According to that article [0], the fix is running too slowly on the Flight Control Computers, that are based on a 80286 architecture. I am not sure how reliable this info is, and that should not be surprising given the cost of verification or certification of an aircraft, but I am still surprised that a 2019 plane, has still some H…
Possibly talking rubbish but: a 286 is simple, well understood both in terms of its spec and its performance (no fancy pipelines, no cache, so very predictable performance), is fabbed probably in the order of a micrometer so highly resistant to cosmic rays (assuming CRs do affect circuitry), inerface to memory that is equally 'boring', those 286s are perhaps hardened and quite possibly still produced for this purpose…
Usually, if you see something old in a plane it's a matter of certification as it's a long and really, really expensive process. If the chip has enough power to do what is needed, the only reason to change it is that procurement for new parts become more expensive than recertification. Given the price of certification, companies make sure these parts remain available for decades as that's still cheaper.
Boeing and the US government recently killed the Canadian aviation industry by putting on 300% duties on our main manufacturer because of a government bailout it received. See: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/us-issues... As a result Bombardier, Canadian's only large aviation manufacturer, was sold to AirBus: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/bombardie... The cause was a Canadian p…
Given America-first and China-first attitudes, smaller countries will have to band together into trade blocs, either minimalist like the TPP, or maximalist like the EU, in order to get fair treatment. It’s the principle reason why Brexit is a disaster for the UK.
I wish someone had put that on the side of the bus, maybe then my compatriots would have believed it.
It's just a shame that "While the EU is not perfect and probably does need some reform, it is on balance a net positive for the UK and not anywhere near as bad as the press would have you believe" also didn't fit on a bus.