Earlier quoted context omitted.
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It's not ridiculous. Your statement reads as "I condemn it, but they really had it coming", which a reasonable person could understand to mean "I don't really condemn it".
The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
571–580 of 695 posts
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sheffield was not equipped with Aegis. The only ships in the 1980s that had it were the American Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers. Aegis is the name of a specific anti-air system based around the SPY-1 phased-array radar and SM-2 surface-to-air missile. It is not a catch-all term like Kleenex.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patrol ship sees and engages a foreign warship inside the patrol's territorial waters and radios for help. First fighter available launches and flies that way to investigate. Sees the warship engaged with the patrol boat and takes initiative, while other fighters are prepping for launch for follow on attacks in case the invading warship does not retreat or surrender.
The issue is "single". Does scrambling a single fighter ever happen, don't they always fly in pairs? A single attack or recognisance plane would make sense. Of course they might have known that their ability to properly identify the threat was limited, but that raises even more questions...
Even if you usually run in pairs, if your gunboat is engaging a foreign hostile, and only one fighter has a pilot immediately available, are you going to wait for a second pilot or just send what you have?
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is "single". Does scrambling a single fighter ever happen, don't they always fly in pairs? A single attack or recognisance plane would make sense. Of course they might have known that their ability to properly identify the threat was limited, but that raises even more questions...
> Does scrambling a single fighter ever happen, don't they always fly in pairs? The USS Stark was hit by missiles from a single aircraft just a year before the incident in question. So no, they don’t always fly in pairs.
The USS Stark was attacked by an (Iraqi) Dassault Falcon 50, not by a fighter jet. Fighters operating solo is virtually unheard of, especially in a live offensive posture.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#575Earlier 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.
I wonder what "jobs that hurt or kill regardless" you have in mind
Anything to do with "defense" industry
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
You seem to be confused, obviously it won't work 100% of the time due to shear probability, it's not physically linked up so there will always be a possibility of one or both pilots ignoring every possible warning, shaking, vibration, mild pushback, etc... regardless of how well they've been trained on detecting these.
Whether it works the vast majority of the time, in practical situations, remains to be seen. Confusing a known, physically guaranteed, aspect of a system with an estimated likelihood of actual system performance is a common mistake.
Even with the most ideal deployment scenario, assuming it does get widely deployed one day, the real world performance reliability will likely not get anywhere near six sigma, let alone 100%.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There really is no mechanical connection. And the Airbus A320 (first airliner with no mechanical backup) has been flying this way since 1988, so it's not anywhere near as dangerous as you think.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#578> 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?
As already pointed out, civilian transponders are not really "IFF", they're a tool for ATC to keep track of you.
Military IFF transponders don't emit unless they get interrogated by a valid code, and then only briefly.
The interrogating plane would typically only interrogate if you show up as a radar contact, and at that point, being able to say "I'm friendly" is very useful. You're not hidden anyway.
Note that the name "Identification Friend or Foe" is misleading; IFF can only positively identify friendlies. A nonresponsive bogey (unknown) may still be a friendly with bent IFF, wrong codes, etc.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#579Earlier 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.
I'm not sure what you are implying. The nature of the work described above was to prevent a disaster like the shooting down of commercial Flight 655 from ever happening again.
Nothing personal, just interesting to see how engineers think about how their work can harm other humans, yet some jobs are about creating machines or weapons meant for destruction.
Re: The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
> shifter? nope - it guesses what direction you want to go. I honestly thought you were making this up, or at the very least exaggerating. I can't believe it's true. It just makes no sense.
Tesla have a habit of doing things that make no sense and making a success out of it regardless.
This is how many things unfortunately "work". The success comes from other things in spite of the business-selfish decisions.
Who would want their TV to spy on them? Who would want an app with nag after nag after nag? businesses want it.