211–220 of 307 posts
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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.
That makes sense. Here’s the question I left the article with: Why not counterbore the pipe before installation, so it’s a trivial process? Would it then not survive welding perhaps?
Reading articles and seeing videos about airline disasters tends to increase my faith in flying rather than making me more afraid of it. Terrorism or sabotage aside, so many failures have to compound to put a modern airliner in a truly irrecoverable state that it's effectively impossible to happen and not worth my time to even worry about. What times we live in that we can hurtle ourselves across oceans at hundreds o…
I was a nervous flyer until I worked on the Boeing 757 design and found out how all the redundancy, etc., worked.
Once I got into our regular flight profile and following our flight plan, I just sat back in my seat and let out a hysterical laughter. I am the calmest person when I fly now :)
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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?
Boeing planes (before MCAS): we have detected a problem with your engines, would you like to shut down?
Airbus planes: we have detected a problem with your engines, we have shut them down for you.
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…
There has been very systematic and deliberate effort to better aviation safety DESPITE commercial pressures.
The swiss cheese means that there are many more layers of randomness that have to line up. Many of those layers came from previous accidents. Those layers are not random at all. Also none of those layers are hole free.
If that disk had disintegrated differently a potentially different set of layers would have applied. Would it have meant fatalities? Possibly. Would it have instantly blown up the plane? We don't know.
But it is pretty obvious that had many of those layers not existed then the chances of a much more disastrous outcome would have been much higher.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Fataliti...
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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.
As an engineer I think a lot about tradeoffs of cost vs other criteria. There is little I can learn from nuclear or aviation industry, as the cost structure ist so completely different. I’m very happy that the costs of safety in aviation are very good accepted, but I understand that few people are willing to pay similar costs for other things like, say, cars.
I find that I can learn a ton from those industries, and as a software engineer I have the added advantage of being able to come up with zero-cost (or low cost), self-documenting abstractions, testing patterns, and ergonomic interfaces that improve the safety of my software.
In software, a lot of safety is embodied in how you structure your interfaces and tests. The biggest cost is your time, but there are economies of scale everywhere. It really pays to think through your interfaces and test plan and systems behavior, and that's where lessons from these other industries can be applied.
So yeah, if you think of these lessons as "do tons of manual QA", you'll run into trouble resourcing it. But you can also think of them as "build systems that continuously self-test, produce telemetry, fail gracefully in legible ways and have multiple redundancies".
Just throwing this out there, if anyone reading this knows of other writers/blogs/books/etc. similarly looking into aviation engineering/failures I would love some recommendations.
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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…
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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.
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.
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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?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_customer_codes
