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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

#191

Post by _a_a_a_ »

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.

Yeah, it costs. That, and that people will accept shite software makes it high quality a fight software companies can avoid. Rationally therefore, they do.

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

#192

Post by jnsaff2 »

masklinn wrote: post #178
jnsaff2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a small experience with RR as a company through a contract. Including some time spent in Derby. The things I saw left me question how any innovation could happen at all in there or why we did not have a much higher rate of fuck-you-shima per year or how the hell plane engines are not exploding daily. IIRC the B777 engine controllers are still m68k. Discontinued in 1995.

> IIRC the B777 engine controllers are still m68k. Discontinued in 1995. That seems sensible? You’d need a really compelling reason to rewrite the entire control software and recertify the engine to match. Especially for an engine which has seen no order in 15 years.

The planes are still in service and need new engines and even existing engines require spare parts.

What I heard was that there was quite a scramble to buy up all existing supply and also talk some alternate manufacturers into continuing production at a low rate.

B777 was introduced in 1995. Having an engine controller that is obsolete and not available any more at the moment it is launched, seems a bit shortsighted to me.

Then again it works, the planes are flying in the end it's fine.

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

#193

Post by SkyPuncher »

stevepeg wrote: post #105
SkyPuncher wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could absolutely design a system that could detect a leak. I’m guessing that it’s just not common enough, or at least catastrophically common enough, to warrant. At its simplest you measure estimated volume delivered to the engines against estimated volume remaining in the tank. Both are things that should be digitally measurable. The problem seems to be that the only case it really matters is in a catastrophic a…

It’s a good idea, some aircraft have quite complex fuel systems though so it would have to account for fuel moving between tanks. E.g. the A330 has an inner tank in each wing (which itself can be split into two compartments if damaged), an outer tank in each wing and fuel in the horizontal stabiliser which is used for CG control in the cruise. All of that plumbing can leak too. You’d be adding significant weight and…

All of that only adds complexity in the calculation, not the measurement.

The engines have predictable fuel consumption patterns. Even if fuel move across a bunch of tanks, you can still calculate total onboard fuels and detect a leak.

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

#194

Post by mango7283 »

pxmpxm wrote: post #189
rvnx wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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"

Well the whole point of articles like this is that they are more "literary" than the investigation reports and therefore more entertaining and engaging to read.

There's a time and place for reading dry technical investigation reports and this is not one of them.

Also, none of the adjectives you highlighted are beyond human comprehension or usage or even rare so it's certainly not an example of what parent was trying to convey.

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

#195

Post by mixdup »

Game_Ender wrote: post #179
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…

The author is positive because of all the safety layers that existed and staid intact, despite how flawed humans and companies are. The culture of looking at previous accidents like the UA232, where they lost ann engine and ALL controls with it, meant the A380 control system was engineered to take even more damage and it worked. I do agree though it did not spend enough effort focusing on the areas to improve: - A co…

I suspect the ECAM only showing a couple of failures at a time is a design feature, not a flaw, to prevent overwhelming the crew as they work through them

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

#197

Post by nojs »

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…

To me it’s impressive because presumably shards of debris cutting through so many distinct parts of the plane at the same time like this is a rare thing compared to more localized failures which the plane would be designed for. Yet all the different failsafes still worked enough to get the plane safely to the ground.

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

#198

Post by Spooky23 »

bboygravity wrote: post #146
uselpa wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars might not be the best example, since human lives are at stake, as in aviation. Unless you work on Teslas autopilot, it seems. But yes, backups and restores are often good enough.

Any substantiation for "Unless you work on Teslas autopilot, it seems"? I mean you're implying that there are more accidents with autopilot than without it, right? Seems like quite the claim...

Tesla people always try to reduce any critique to some metric on deaths per x.

The fact is, there’s a lot of history and best practice around building safety critical systems that Tesla doesn’t follow.

Additionally, even with the practices they follow, they call a consumer facing product that isn’t really an autopilot “autopilot”, while focusing outbound comms on a beta product that is more like an autopilot, but not available to them.

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

#199

Post by thaumasiotes »

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.

Something similar that struck me was that, in early February, Russia invaded Ukraine.

And then, I saw an endless stream of aggrieved comments from people who were personally outraged that the outcome, whatever it might be, hadn't been finalized yet at the late, late date of... late February.

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

#200

Post by masklinn »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #192
masklinn wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IIRC the B777 engine controllers are still m68k. Discontinued in 1995. That seems sensible? You’d need a really compelling reason to rewrite the entire control software and recertify the engine to match. Especially for an engine which has seen no order in 15 years.

The planes are still in service and need new engines and even existing engines require spare parts. What I heard was that there was quite a scramble to buy up all existing supply and also talk some alternate manufacturers into continuing production at a low rate. B777 was introduced in 1995. Having an engine controller that is obsolete and not available any more at the moment it is launched, seems a bit shortsighted…

> B777 was introduced in 1995. Having an engine controller that is obsolete and not available any more at the moment it is launched, seems a bit shortsighted to me.

First, in 1995 Motorola stopped development of the ISA, that says nothing about chip manufacturing which is what RR or airlines would care for. Ti launched the 68k-powered 89 three years later, and only switched away with the N-Spire CAS in 2007. Pilots launched 68k-powered Pilots in 1997.

Second, the early 90s were a time of flux for ISA and you could not necessarily know the plans of your provider, the 68k probably looked quite reasonable when RR started developing the Trents in the mid 80s. RR launched the 777’s 800 in 1991. And even after that, 68ks powered much of the early 80s and early 90s.

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