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A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

admiralcloudberg.medium.com

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

#181

Post by greggsy »

survivorBias wrote: post #161
magicalhippo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're making a niche B2B application, and this is very much it for us as well. Our customers are in a cutthroat market with low margins. We can't spend a ton on pre-analysis, redundancies and so on. Instead we've focused reduced the impact of failures. We've made it trivial to switch to an older build in case the new one has an issue. Thus if they hit a bug they can almost always work around it by going to an older b…

You can not. AI though, can be cheap enough to produce that. I wonder what happens if you take a b2b application and let it rewrite with AI to Nuclear Industry/ Aviation standards into a seperate repo. Then on fixes/rewrite the engineers take the "safety aware repository" as inspiration.

You’ve missed the point. Those standards don’t relate at all to writing code, they relate to process, procedure and due diligence - i.e. governance. Those all cost a lot in terms of man hours.

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

#182

Post by ch4s3 »

survivorBias wrote: post #161
magicalhippo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're making a niche B2B application, and this is very much it for us as well. Our customers are in a cutthroat market with low margins. We can't spend a ton on pre-analysis, redundancies and so on. Instead we've focused reduced the impact of failures. We've made it trivial to switch to an older build in case the new one has an issue. Thus if they hit a bug they can almost always work around it by going to an older b…

You can not. AI though, can be cheap enough to produce that. I wonder what happens if you take a b2b application and let it rewrite with AI to Nuclear Industry/ Aviation standards into a seperate repo. Then on fixes/rewrite the engineers take the "safety aware repository" as inspiration.

Have you tried using an LLM to write code to any kind of standard? I recently spent two hours trying to get GPT 4 to build a fiddly regex and ultimately found a better solution on Stack Overflow. In my experiments it also produced lackluster concurrent code.

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

#183

Post by Simon_ORourke »

modernpacifist wrote: post #40

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…

A colleague of mine came from a major aviation design company before joining tech and said they were in a state of culture shock at how critical systems were designed and monitored. Even if there are no hard real time requirements for a billing system, this guy was surprised at just how lax tech design patterns tended to be.

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

#184

Post by ogurechny »

eastbound wrote: post #163
woutr_be wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember there was this video of a plane in Russia that was on fire, multiple people died. And you see people walking away with their luggage, can’t help it think people would still be alive if it wasn’t for those who so urgently needed their suitcases.

People don’t follow the rules when they don’t trust their government for providing sane rules. Case in point when you provide an example with Russia. Other example is Covid.

Oh great.

Fire creates smoke. Smoke quickly makes people unconscious, then kills them. It doesn't matter whether you trust the government or not, whether you follow the rules or not, whether you hold your luggage or not, if you can't get out of smoke, your fate is pretty much set in stone. Putting the blame on people who never had the time in the first place, and couldn't supernaturally turn to liquid and go through the door all at once is like telling that those who were robbed could've trained themselves to run faster.

Although you can argue that Titanic could survive, if only had it blasted bass-boosted .

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

#185

Post by d1sxeyes »

Gare wrote: post #70
crabmusket wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Makes it even more impressive: the parts that were actually implicated in the explosion itself (and scattered from the aircraft) were not defective, so the investigation had to go through parts which did not seem to have exploded in order to track down the defect.

Or at least, I assume the turbine parts weren’t defective, although given what seems to be quite a happy-go-lucky approach to manufacturing defects in Hucknall, maybe my assumption is not made on solid grounds…

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

#186

Post by magicalhippo »

greggsy wrote: post #181
survivorBias wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can not. AI though, can be cheap enough to produce that. I wonder what happens if you take a b2b application and let it rewrite with AI to Nuclear Industry/ Aviation standards into a seperate repo. Then on fixes/rewrite the engineers take the "safety aware repository" as inspiration.

You’ve missed the point. Those standards don’t relate at all to writing code, they relate to process, procedure and due diligence - i.e. governance. Those all cost a lot in terms of man hours.

Exactly. Even without learning from those groups, there's a ton of stuff we know we could do to improve the reliability of our product. It's just that it would take way too much development time and our customers wouldn't want to pay for it.

It's like buying a thermometer from Home Depot vs a highly accurate, calibrated lab thermometer. Sometimes you just don't need that quality and it's a waste paying for it.

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

#187

Post by caf »

ogurechny wrote: post #165

The article is complex and well written, but I am a bit perplexed by the victorious tone and never-ending praise of safety. It resembles a sales pitch a bit too much, even though no one is selling anything. Maybe it's unintentional, and being around salesmen just does that to people. If you are like me, you've probably said “hmm…” to yourself multiple times when certain things were mentioned, because those were thing…

They do have multiple kill switches to stop the engines, up to dumping a bunch of flame retardant into it which makes it impossible to restart. The problem was that all these systems for the #1 engine were rendered inoperable by the damage caused by the failure of the #2 engine.

Certainly there was a fair bit of luck involved as well.

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

#188

Post by pbhjpbhj »

cstross wrote: post #172
asystole wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in principle, but I don't think industries should be looking at current-day Boeing's engineering practices except for an example of how a proud company's culture can rot from the inside out with fatal consequences.

Reminder that this article was about an aircraft built by Airbus . (Airbus is not Boeing.)

How are aeroplanes designed differently at Boeing vs Airbus? What's the secret sauce?

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

#189

Post by pxmpxm »

rvnx wrote: post #89
ghaff wrote: post #3

What an extraordinarily detailed writeup.

[flagged]

Not sure about GPT, but it's hella overwrought - it's like someone took the investigation PDF and tried to make the cheesiest Lifetime movie out of it. Far too many superfluous adjectives and embellishments; barely readable IMO.

eg "The red-hot, wildly spinning disk instantly fractured into several sections, which rocketed outward in multiple directions at incomprehensible speed"

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

#190

Post by bitcharmer »

mzi wrote: post #109
modernpacifist wrote: post #40

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…

It took hundreds of subject experts from ten organizations in seven countries almost three years to reach that conclusion. Here at HN we want a post mortem for a cloud failure in a matter of hours.

Apples to oranges
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