Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 199 posts

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#141

Post by nobodyandproud »

zaroth wrote: post #12

The can of worms has been officially opened, and this may turn out to be a case study in how bad software and outsourcing your centers of excellence can bankrupt a company. If TFA is to believed, Boeing has embarked on a project to take what is currently a master-slave failover design and jury-rig it into a master-master real-time system. This is based on bad performance in the simulator—not because of MCAS—but while…

tl;dr : The Kruger-Dunning effect is most visible in the upper-management circles, where politics and charismatic talents are necessary skills.

Former engineering powerhouses like HP, Boeing, and IBM slowly get hollowed-out into incompetence when it’s assumed that Engineering and technical skills don’t require a considerable depth of knowledge and experience.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#142

Post by OnlineGladiator »

bobthepanda wrote: post #140
ethbro wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why this keeps getting repeated. Boeing certainly bears culpability for failing to execute, and whatever terrible lapses in certification were made to get there. But why were they doing a dumb thing in the first place? Because American Airlines asked-told them to. (Because they didn't want to have to pay to retrain pilots) Boeing deserves to have substantial portions of management jailed over this, but t…

Boeing could've said no.

I agree with you.

This sounds like the ratings agencies during the last recession, where they knew they were handing out good rating for junk bonds because if they didn't do it they'd lose a customer to the competition.

It's totally fucked.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#143

Post by [deleted] »

thfuran wrote: post #128
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion courses wouldn't change behavior, modern computer science is designed to infantalize coders and make them interchangeable. Think of all the effort startups put into marketing themselves as "COOL TO WORK FOR"/"WE HAVE BEER ON FRIDAYS". These reinforce the idea that you are small and need management to tell you exactly what to do everyday, because you're a dumb idiot who spends all day watching anime and…

Given >marketing themselves as "COOL TO WORK FOR"/"WE HAVE BEER ON FRIDAYS", "the idea that you are small and need management to tell you exactly what to do everyday, because you're a dumb idiot who spends all day watching anime and playing video games" does not follow.

[deleted]

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#144

Post by throw1222lak »

azalemeth wrote: post #71
danso wrote: post #10

FWIW, the near-crash in the simulator was apparently not directly related to MCAS, but occurred when Boeing "simulated what would happen if gamma rays from space scrambled data in the plane’s flight-control computers." > In one scenario, the plane aggressively dove in a way that mimicked what happened in the crashes on the grounded jetliner, the people said. While such a failure had never occurred in the 737’s histor…

> a simulated edge case involving "gamma rays from space"? People have nearly died because of exactly this situation. See, for example, Quantas Flight 72 [1], in which a pair of sudden, uncommanded pitch-down manoeuvres that caused severe injuries -- including fractures, lacerations and spinal injuries -- to several of the passengers and crew. A long and detailed investigation essentially concluded that these events…

That's not what the Wikipedia links says:

"A number of potential trigger types were investigated, including software bugs, software corruption, hardware faults, electromagnetic interference and the secondary high energy particles generated by cosmic rays. Although a definitive conclusion could not be reached, there was sufficient information from multiple sources to conclude that most of the potential triggers were very unlikely to have been involved. A much more likely scenario was that a marginal hardware weakness of some form made the units susceptible to the effects of some type of environmental factor, which triggered the failure mode."

Cosmic rays would be a very convenient excuse. (Cue the ECC RAM lobby, which will probably downvote this.)

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#145

Post by tofof »

MFLoon wrote: post #118
uxp100 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true that CS students don't take an ethics course? I have a 10 year old SE degree and I took 3, only 1 of which was engineering specific. (I took a philosophy ethics course, which really isn't that relevant to issues like these anyway, but also a course that was specific to ethical issues in computing.) OTOH, I'm skeptical those courses change behavior, and in this particular case others in comments are sayin…

SE = structural engineering? That's cool, I'm glad your discipline is receiving some ethical training. I've never heard of any CS program including any sort of engineering or general ethics courses in their curricula.

Every single CS baccalaureate degree from the University of Illinois has required from at least 2005[1] a mandatory engineering ethics course (CS 210).

Note that the UofI has always been in the top ten nationally for CS; its 2020 rank is #6 (behind MIT, CMU, UCBerkeley, Georgia Inst. of Tech, and Stanford).

1: 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20050321215749/http://courses.ui...

2: 2019: https://cs.illinois.edu/academics/undergraduate/degree-progr...

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#146

Post by gdubs »

jackhack wrote: post #53
akersten wrote: post #2

These should not fly for a decade. They're rewriting the avionics from scratch. This should require a years-long process of testing, external auditing, and approvals. I'd even go so far as to say in flight, we should require competitor review. That's right, no trade secrets. If you want your Hello World up in the air, you better let your competitor vet the source code. This is an engineering boondoggle and an embarra…

>>Software does not need to be this complicated. >>Design a damned airframe that's airworthy without needing stabilization hacks. In effect you are stating that you understand better than the hundreds of engineers involved with this project why these design trade-offs were made. Careful with that line of thinking. You're nearly guaranteed to be wrong. There are a host of reasons for the design in place: Efficiency, e…

Isn’t that an appeal to authority fallacy though? With everything that’s come out about the Max, it’s clear that something is rotten in the process.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#147

Post by gdubs »

ethbro wrote: post #129
davidhyde wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, the MAX was only designed to beat the competition to market with the least amount of re-certification and re-training. That gamble (with Boeing's reputation, the FAA reputation and most importantly, people's lives) did not pay off. They won't get away with rushing though certification of a complete rewrite of their flight software. The world is watching now. Time to cut losses and junk the MAX entirely.

I'm not sure why this keeps getting repeated. Boeing certainly bears culpability for failing to execute, and whatever terrible lapses in certification were made to get there. But why were they doing a dumb thing in the first place? Because American Airlines asked-told them to. (Because they didn't want to have to pay to retrain pilots) Boeing deserves to have substantial portions of management jailed over this, but t…

Is it that the airlines told them to? Or was Boeing trying to avoid retraining in order to undercut their competitors prices?

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#148

Post by EricE »

chkaloon wrote: post #57
zaroth wrote: post #12

The can of worms has been officially opened, and this may turn out to be a case study in how bad software and outsourcing your centers of excellence can bankrupt a company. If TFA is to believed, Boeing has embarked on a project to take what is currently a master-slave failover design and jury-rig it into a master-master real-time system. This is based on bad performance in the simulator—not because of MCAS—but while…

That, or this article missed the boat somehow. I find it hard to believe that a total redesign is happening and that they expect to be done by the end of the year. Either this article is wrong, or something is terribly wrong at Boeing.

No kidding! How sad is it the entire time I was reading this I kept looking back at "Bloomberg" and was thinking to their other reporting like the server spying that they never did explain.

The National Enquirer may be more reliable than Bloomberg at this point.

Re: Delays in Boeing Max Return Began with Near-Crash in Simulator

#149

Post by kelnos »

nikanj wrote: post #127
drawkbox wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic case of hitting the date but crunched out with technical debt and buggy software, a tell that management/finance/marketing is driving the decision over the engineer/designer/product people. People forget a project was late if it succeeds, they never forget a project on time that failed because it was rushed, buggy and not polished production. MBA/business and marketing need to go back to letting the product p…

> People forget a project was late if it succeeds, they never forget a project on time that failed because it was rushed, buggy and not polished production. #notallMBAs, but the surest way for your product to fail on the market is for your company to go bankrupt before you’ve polished it enough. In this specific case it was about greed, but sometimes MBAs push for release, because according to the engineering teams t…

"Perfect" is of course unattainable, but I'd at least hope that engineering could be able to push for -- and be granted -- the time to build a system that meets what should be some pretty obvious safety requirements around redundancy and failure detection.
Post reply on HN