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A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

admiralcloudberg.medium.com

61–70 of 307 posts

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#61
post #23

And this is why fully autonomous flight control systems won't be certified for airliners in our lifetimes. While autonomous systems are capable of taking off, navigating to a destination, and landing they are largely incapable of handling major emergencies. It's impossible for engineers to foresee every possible failure mode and program for it.

It’s worth pointing out that there are also plenty of airliner crashes that are attributed to pilot error.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#62

I don't know about others, but I can't help but smile when I read the detailed series of events in aviation postmortems. To be able to zero in on what turned out to be a single faulty part and then trace the entire provenance and environment that led to that defective part entering service speaks to the robustness of the industry. I say that sincerely since mistakes are going to happen and in my view robustness has l…

If 200 people died after a db instance crashed, software would be equal in that regard.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#63

I don't know about others, but I can't help but smile when I read the detailed series of events in aviation postmortems. To be able to zero in on what turned out to be a single faulty part and then trace the entire provenance and environment that led to that defective part entering service speaks to the robustness of the industry. I say that sincerely since mistakes are going to happen and in my view robustness has l…

Aerospace things have to be like this or they just wouldn’t work at all. There are just too many points of failure and redundancy is capped by physics. When there’s a million things which if they went wrong could cause catastrophic failure, you have to be really good at learning how to not make mistakes.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#64

I don't know about others, but I can't help but smile when I read the detailed series of events in aviation postmortems. To be able to zero in on what turned out to be a single faulty part and then trace the entire provenance and environment that led to that defective part entering service speaks to the robustness of the industry. I say that sincerely since mistakes are going to happen and in my view robustness has l…

If 200 people died after a db instance crashed, software would be equal in that regard.

To prove this, software that deals with medical stuff is somewhat more like aviation.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#65

I don't know about others, but I can't help but smile when I read the detailed series of events in aviation postmortems. To be able to zero in on what turned out to be a single faulty part and then trace the entire provenance and environment that led to that defective part entering service speaks to the robustness of the industry. I say that sincerely since mistakes are going to happen and in my view robustness has l…

As a former Boeing engineer, other industries can learn a great deal from how airplanes are designed. The Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon disasters were both "zipper" failures that showed little thought was given to "when X fails, then what?"

Note I wrote when X fails, not if X fails. It's a different way of thinking.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#66
post #42

I don't know about others, but I can't help but smile when I read the detailed series of events in aviation postmortems. To be able to zero in on what turned out to be a single faulty part and then trace the entire provenance and environment that led to that defective part entering service speaks to the robustness of the industry. I say that sincerely since mistakes are going to happen and in my view robustness has l…

I think many of us are so used to working with software, with its constant need for adaptation and modification in order to meet an ever growing list of integration requirements, that we forget the benefits of working with a finalized spec with known constants like melting points, air pressure, and gravity.

Airliners face constantly changing specifications. No two airliners are built the same.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#67

I don't know about others, but I can't help but smile when I read the detailed series of events in aviation postmortems. To be able to zero in on what turned out to be a single faulty part and then trace the entire provenance and environment that led to that defective part entering service speaks to the robustness of the industry. I say that sincerely since mistakes are going to happen and in my view robustness has l…

Aerospace things have to be like this or they just wouldn’t work at all. There are just too many points of failure and redundancy is capped by physics. When there’s a million things which if they went wrong could cause catastrophic failure, you have to be really good at learning how to not make mistakes.

> you have to be really good at learning how to not make mistakes.

Not exactly. The idea is not not making mistakes, it's whatcha gonna do about X when (not if) it fails.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#68
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many of us are so used to working with software, with its constant need for adaptation and modification in order to meet an ever growing list of integration requirements, that we forget the benefits of working with a finalized spec with known constants like melting points, air pressure, and gravity.

Airliners face constantly changing specifications. No two airliners are built the same.

Do you mean no two individual planes? Like two 767s made a month apart, do you mean they literally would have different requirements?

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#69
post #39

I'm wondering why the tolerances for the oil pipe were so small in the first place. Why not make the pipe one or two mm thicker?

Because there are a zillion important parts on the airplane, if you make each one heavier than it needs to be, the airplane will be nailed to the tarmac.

Re: A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

#70

I don't know about others, but I can't help but smile when I read the detailed series of events in aviation postmortems. To be able to zero in on what turned out to be a single faulty part and then trace the entire provenance and environment that led to that defective part entering service speaks to the robustness of the industry. I say that sincerely since mistakes are going to happen and in my view robustness has l…

> To be able to zero in on what turned out to be a single faulty part and then trace the entire provenance and environment that led to that defective part entering service speaks to the robustness of the industry. And to be able to reconstruct the chain of events after the components in question have exploded and been scattered throughout south-east Asia is incredible.

My impressiom was that the defective part was still inside the engine when it landed.
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