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Why you've never been in a plane crash

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Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#91

Post by lmz »

josephg wrote: post #71
EthicalSimilar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would just cause more companies to outsource anyway.

It might do the opposite. Imagine if the company was held responsible for the quality of the software regardless of how it was made. I suspect it would be much easier to meet any quality standards if software was written in-house.

It would get outsourced to the first provider who can indemnify the company against any failures in the software. Whether or not any provider would dare to provide such a service however...

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#92

Post by bheadmaster »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
bheadmaster wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Singling out the engineer isn't blameless. Considering that everyone already knew who was responsible, I think saying "you won't be held accountable for this mistake" is the most blameless thing you can do. > Sure it's a learning opportunity but it's a learning opportunity for everyone involved. One person shouldn't be able to take the site down. The way I read the comment, it sounds to me exactly like what Zuckerb…

Not really. If you single someone out as CEO that's a punishment. Even if your words are superficially nice what he really did was blame the engineer and told him not to do it again. He should have left it with the engineer's line manager to make that comment, if at all because essentially he's telling the employee nothing that he didn't know already. You did something well, but we made mistakes.

> Even if your words are superficially nice what he really did was blame the engineer and told him not to do it again.

The person being told that may feel that way, but IMO nothing from his phrasing implies that:

    "let's just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can't happen again"
Note the "can't" in the "can't happen again" - he isn't telling the employee "don't you dare do that again!" as you seem to be saying, he's saying "let's all figure out how to protect our systems from such mistakes".

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#94

Post by xtracto »

aramndrt wrote: post #9

Reminds me of the guy at GitLab, I believe it was, who accidentally and irreversibly deleted a bunch of repositories. GitLab had a fantastic approach to that whole ordeal and public embarrassment. They essentially blamed themselves for not having the proper contingencies in place instead of blaming the individual. It's worth reading up on.

It happened to me and my team like 10 years ago or so: An engineer deleted the production database. We were able to recover it. But the postmortem basically focused on why the he heck did we let that happen. The guy stayed in the company for 8 years more IIRC. We fixed our systemic issue as well.

I've read about blameless postmortems from Medical professionals and I always tell my teams: if those guys (doctors) can do blameless PMs after someone has died, we can do them.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#95

Post by brazzy »

siva7 wrote: post #63

>> It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition. If people die in an accident, blameless postmortem shouldn't be the answer but accountability. Otherwise events like the MCAS disaster would be just an "happy accident" with no one to blame.

No, accountability is a very insufficient answer, because it helps very little in identifying and fixing broken systems.

In a lot of cases, this one being a particularly good example, nobody was particularly incompetent, negligent, malicious, or greedy. But the system as a whole lacked safeguards so that a single person's inconspicous mistake could cause a disaster, and overloaded that person's attention.

Sure, there's other cases where you can clearly identify negligence, malice, or greed of specific people as causes of the disaster. But there as well, holding those people accountable doesn't fix the system than incentivised the greed, doesn't prevent incompetent, malicious or negligent people from getting into positions where actions based on those traits cause disasters, and doesn't provide safeguards against such actions.

The deterrence value of holding individuals accountable for extremely rare events is approximately zero.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#96

Post by bradfa »

Why don't we as a society apply similar safety culture to driving cars and trucks as we do to aviation?

MANY more people are harmed or killed by automobiles than by aircraft per person-mile traveled. A small improvement in automobile safety could make a large impact on society. Many of the types of improvements implemented by aviation mentioned in this article, when applied to the automotive world, would look like improvements or changes to road design.

Obviously, if you're a pilot and flying drunk who harms others or a driver who drives drunk and harms others, YOU are clearly to blame. But for the other kinds of crashes, it feels like the automotive world learning from aviation would have a lot of value.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#97

Post by petesergeant »

sgjohnson wrote: post #88
phkahler wrote: post #74

Boeing management should read this so they can maybe understand the nature of their quality problems is systemic and not the result of a few little oopses.

Boeing fucking up with the 737 Max so much is merely a symptom. They so desperately needed it to remain a 737 so it wouldn’t be a new type and therefore wouldn’t need a new type rating was mostly because the airlines demanded a better 737. Yes, Boeing is at fault for the MCAS disaster (no redundancies, holy fucking hell), but in reality it was the entire industry. My point is, had nothing changed, it would have happe…

> in reality it was the entire industry

Do you have further reading on this? First time I’ve seen someone suggest that Airbus has similar structural issues to Boeing when it comes to safety

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#98

Post by hayst4ck »

latexr wrote: post #68
ricardobeat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know when this was turned into a Facebook trope, but I’ve heard it before as an engineer asking “Am I being fired?”, to which the director responds “We just invested four million dollars in your education. You are now one of our most valuable employees!”

> four million dollars That looks like a value inflated by retellings of the popular Thomas Watson quote (see sibling comments).

Four million is definitely in the range of an outage at peak, that's not counting reallocated engineering resources to root cause and fix the problem, the opportunity cost of that fix in lost features, extra work by PR, potential contractual obligations for uptime, outage aftershocks, recruiting implications, customer support implications, etc.

If you have a once a year outage, how many employee-hours do you think you are going to lose to socially talking about it and not getting work done that day?

$116.6 Billion in revenue is ~13 million an hour. Outages usually happen under greater load, so very likely closer to ~25 mil an hour in practice.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#99

Post by rob74 »

siva7 wrote: post #63

>> It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition. If people die in an accident, blameless postmortem shouldn't be the answer but accountability. Otherwise events like the MCAS disaster would be just an "happy accident" with no one to blame.

The thing with the two MCAS accidents is that you don't have too few people to blame, but too many:

- the airlines who wanted a more fuel-efficient plane that should still have the same type certificate as the (at that time) 40+ year old Boeing 737

- Boeing management, who wanted to keep those airlines as customers

- Boeing engineering, who did what they did at the management's request

- the FAA, who failed to spot the issue

- the mechanics of the involved airlines, who dispatched the planes without working angle-of-attack sensors

- the airlines who ordered planes without the (optional) "angle-of-attack disagree" alert

- the pilots (just for the sake of completeness), who failed to notice the issue and either refuse to fly the plane or correct it in time to avoid the crash

Who do you want to single out here?

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#100

Post by sgjohnson »

mrjin wrote: post #60
hk__2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You, reader, have never been in a plane crash, because if you’d have been in one, you’d be dead. You’d be surprised: > According to a study by the European Transport Safety Council, plane crashes technically have a 90% survivability rate, and this figure is increasing, largely thanks to modern aircraft design, which features enough exits to allow for a full passenger evacuation in around 90 seconds. > Recent proof…

I would assume the pilots of those still had control to some extent?

Total loss of control basically never happens. I’ve been reading and watching a lot of videos on aircraft accidents and near misses, and I haven’t seen a single one where there truly was a total loss of all controls over the aircraft.

Even in the case of Japan Airlines Flight 123 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_Flight_123) the pilots still had some degree of control over the plane after its tail was ripped off due to a structural failure leading to explosive decompression at cruising altitude which also caused a total loss of all hydraulic systems.

Unfortunately what they had left (control over the engine thrust) was not enough, but they sure did their best. Apparently you can still control (to some extent) the plane using just the engines, with and the vertical stabilizer being completely gone, and no hydraulics. And this was in 1985.

I’m not saying that JAL 123 was in any way survivable (although some miraciously did survive), just pointing to the fact that even in the worst possible scenario there’s still probably a way to somehow control the plane.

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