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A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

admiralcloudberg.medium.com

201–210 of 307 posts

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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. There are constant changes to the design to improve reliability, performance, and fix problems, and the airlines change their requirements constantly.

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

#202
post #109

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.

I work at mid tier FAANG, our SLA for post mortems have SLA in the 7-14 day period. Nobody seriously wants a full PM in hours.

They may want a mitigation or RCA in hours, but even AWS gives us NDA restricted PMs in > 24 hours.

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

#203

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.

What you're describing is almost exactly the opposite of what LLMs are good for. Quickly getting a draft of something roughly like what you want without having to look a bunch of stuff up? Great, go wild. Writing something to a very high standard, with careful attention to specs and possible failure cases, and meticulous following of rules? Antithetical to the way cutting-edge AI works.

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

#204

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.

Likewise, in "aviation" when the entertainment system completely fails in a 4 hour flight, there is most like no post mortem at all. They turn it off/on again just like most of us.

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

#205

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…

It is very common and encouraged to add a "What went well" in post mortems. This is not a pat yourself on the back moment. It is to reflect on what failed and what didn't.

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

#206
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As silly as it might seem, you do something enough times and oddball rare things happen .. this is an instruction intended to reduce: * shoes | boots with sharp objects embedded in soles (glass, bent nails) * extra spikey high heels, * work boots with hard edged metal hooks for laces, (etc) causing damage to both inflatable slipways and to other passengers. How often has a passenger going down an emergancy slide caus…

Also, try to swim/stay afloat with shoes ... Apart from young athletes, most people will drown within a minute

I dunno — when I go camping by canoe, I keep my hiking boots on all the time: paddling, portaging, and yes, when having a swim during a break for lunch or after making camp). A disabling injury could be fatal.

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

#207

My first job was working at a mro that overhauled engines a bit smaller than the Trent 900s but same principles apply. I built qa software to digitize the forms and signature process like what’s mentioned in the article as having not correctly been signed off on. I ate lunch with repair engineers that had dark wells of knowledge about the engines they worked on. They could talk so deep on a subject that lunch break w…

Agreed. I've worked in a company that was AS9001 certified, and pretty much the first things a quality auditor would have wanted to look at would be non-conformances and concessions. With than number of missing signatures we'd have been skinned alive, and it would likely have prompted the auditor to then turn the place upside down looking for more problems.

That would then have produced major failings in the audit, if not the outright revocation of the quality accreditation, which I would then expect to be followed up on by an audit from the customer (which in the case of TFA would be Rolls Royce), asking some rather uncomfortable questions of the management, examining whether the inter-company concession process was being adhered to, and perhaps reflecting internally (i.e. within RR) - "Do we think these folks are the right people to be making these parts for us?"

From what I've read here it seems to me that Rolls Royce were astonishingly lax in not riding their subcontractors nearly hard enough, quality wise.

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

#208
post #19

So did he pass his check flight? ;)

I know airline regs and reality would never allow it, but I like to think the check pilot tore up the assessment form, and just walked into the CEO's office and plunked down the cockpit audio. "Yeah, he passed."

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Same way Samsung phones are not Huawei phones? Or BMWs aren't Lexus?

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Likewise, in "aviation" when the entertainment system completely fails in a 4 hour flight, there is most like no post mortem at all. They turn it off/on again just like most of us.

This is true in a lot of industries. Unless there’s 7+ figure costs or significant human losses, there’s usually not an exhaustive investigation to conclusively point to the exact cause and chain of events.
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