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

The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

octodon.social

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 695 posts

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#551

Post by xp84 »

grotorea wrote: post #98

Since we're on the topic, you know how much HN complains about touchscreens on cars? Now find out how replacing old school analog controls with software touchscreens UI partly led to the USS John S. McCain colliding: https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

This is a fascinating article. I feel like I am in my life constantly fighting against either haphazard UI like the one featured there, and the Apple-style UIs which attempt to optimize for beauty by shoving nearly everything (regardless of usefulness) into layers of "••• junk drawers" or little (i) icons.

On a ship worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it was never considered that the Big Red Button should have a plain English red sign saying "Emergency Take-Control-Here Button. Press to return control to THIS station."

The software designers as well could have used plain and direct language too, and made it easy to do the right thing, and require deliberateness to do a weird thing. If it's wildly irregular to have 2 people independently doing port/starboard thrust control, the process should be like "Transfer Thrust Control", followed by a modal with a giant "BOTH SIDES" button and two tiny "Port only" "Stbd Only" buttons.

Also when you are moving around something as important as control of your ship, why not have a simple voice announcement, what does a loudspeaker cost, 20 dollars a piece? "The Thrust control has been transferred to the Lee Helm" or "All Controls were transferred to the Bridge because the Red Take-Control Button was pressed at that station."

Sometimes I think only thoughtless people and Jony Ive-worshipers are doing UI design.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#552

Post by masklinn »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #511
masklinn wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they would: the problem is that there is a lack of feedback when incompatible input is entered. Audio feedback was added since AF 447 but as well known sound is one of the first thing to be blanked out in high stress situations. Physical feedback provides a second stimulus, and one which does not get ignored as much. The planes are FBW, the side sticks have no mechanical linkage outside their control box, t…

The moment one pilot does tug hard on the stick though, then the same problem is still there. So it will work most of the time except when you really need to, when the other pilot is panicking and won't provide accurate answers.

> The moment one pilot does tug hard on the stick though, then the same problem is still there.

No, because the point is that the other pilot will feel the action and thus know that there are conflicting input. The sticks can even synchronise their movements, that way pilots can both see and feel that their copilot is inputting.

That is the point, making the existence of conflicting input clearer.

> So it will work most of the time except when you really need to

No.

> when the other pilot is panicking and won't provide accurate answers.

The sticks support taking priority, so a pilot seeing that their copilot is panic-inputting would be trained to press and hold the priority takeover button, deactivating their copilot’s stick.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#553

Post by angiosperm »

psunavy03 wrote: post #505
pesfandiar wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers sometimes wonder about the importance of their jobs by comparing them to other engineering fields where mistakes can hurt or kill fellow human beings. And then there are jobs that hurt or kill regardless of the quality of your work.

Go read about the software bug that literally killed people by miscalculating the radiation dose given by a medical machine. There is software which can hurt or kill fellow human beings. Industrial controls, aircraft flight controls, the list goes on.

The number of people harmed by that ramshackle contraption never came anywhere near the number wiped out in just the one incident.

Mis-operation of the Aegis system is, BTW, also responsible for the sinking of a British warship, HMS Sheffield, in the Falklands war, with at least 87 killed. It failed to identify an Exocet missile fired by the Argentines as a threat, even though the Navy was thoroughly aware Argentina had them.. (Two other British ships were also hit by Exocets, one sunk, for a couple dozen more lives.)

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#554

Post by simne »

next_xibalba wrote: post #467
proaralyst wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't get shot down by your own air defense

Why would it need to be interoperable then? Presumably it tells adversaries that you’re friend OR foe though. The friend bit is obvious. The foe… still not seeing the logic.

That's easy. On many civilian planes, beacon turned on automatically, but on military must be turned on intentionally.

Because of this, extremely typical, when you see military plane, but have not got alarm about it's approach - just pilot forgot to turn on beacon.

FoF system is totally another measure, in real dogfight they do not consider it much, it is mostly like additional spare fuse, may save your life in some case. Rumors said, pilots of U-2 was pray, to avoid cases, where need to use these radio tricks.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#555

Post by next_xibalba »

outworlder wrote: post #487
next_xibalba wrote: post #414

> every large aircraft in the world is equipped with a device called an IFF -- "identification friend or foe." This is weird, I'm sure I don't have all the facts. In a conflict, why would a military aircraft ever want to identify itself?

I have tried to find the sentence you quoted in the article and was not able to. But it is not true that "every large aircraft (...) carries an IFF". IFF is strictly military. What civilian aircraft do have (large and small) is a transponder. The article talks about this but in a confusing way.

The quote is from the 2nd or 3rd post in the thread. The ui is pretty bad so it’s not obvious at first that it is a thread.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#556

Post by thereddaikon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #516
outworlder wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We update planes’ software as part of maintenance We don't OTA plane software updates. > We OTA spacecraft. Because we can't realistically bring them back and there's an incredible amount of work that goes into make those updates flawless. Spacecraft are not a mass produced consumer product driven by profits and are less likely to have corners cut.

Sure. We still update the software. The tool which airlines use to create update blobs is even online [1]. > Because we can't realistically bring them back We couldn’t always OTA spacecraft. Back then we just lost them. The point is in even high-stakes games we don’t write flawless software. Now software in cares is doing more. There will be bugs. Pretending there won’t is delusional. What we can do is minimise safet…

None of this is a compelling argument for car OTA software updates.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#557

Post by thescriptkiddie »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #291
quietbritishjim wrote: post #204

Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447. This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where t…

It's not something that can be changed on airbus cockpits, since the nature of side sticks makes them impossible to be mechanically linked, unless there was some very complex motor system built into each stick that provided force feedback equal in strength to a pilot tugging hard on it.

is there really no mechanical connection between the stick and the control surfaces on an airbus? that seems really dangerous.

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#558

Post by dredmorbius »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #222
quietbritishjim wrote: post #204

Another good write up of this incident is on the excellent Admiral Cloudberg blog: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-shadow-of-war-t... Another article in that series is also related to a UX mistake: Air France Flight 447. This crashed, in part, because the inputs from two control sticks (one for pilot and other for copilot) were averaged if they disagreed, unlike on a Boeing (at the time at least) where t…

The tragic AF447 flight comes up somewhat regularly on the site — see this recent conversation [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089363

CFIT is a particularly spectacular form of failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain>

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#559

Post by thr0w__4w4y »

Would just like to jump in and remind folks of the Therac-25 incident just a couple years before this (1985 and 1987), and the user interface was also identified as a contributing factor.

https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse470/Public/Handouts/Therac/Side_...

Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

#560

Post by angiosperm »

rbanffy wrote: post #435
ceejayoz wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially with an element of "I might personally get blown up" involved.

With proper training, that should be irrelevant. They probably had second thoughts, but they got confirmation that contact 4474 was descending rapidly.

It was a disgraceful dereliction of duty by the implementers of Aegis to recycle contact IDs so eagerly. With 4 digits it should have taken 10,000 subsequent contacts before that number came around again.
Post reply on HN