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If you watch The Aviation Herald, this kind of reporting feels a little like trying to write news stories off VAERS data. Crazy shit is happening more or less all the time in planes; the idea isn't that nothing ever goes wrong, but that layered controls prevent injuries or hull losses. It's not that there necessarily isn't a thru-line to these stories. And I read "Flying Blind" like everyone else and share the popula…
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Airbus had a problem like this on an A330 due to corrupted AOA data in the flight computers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72
Cosmic rays*
The issue was not definitively traced to cosmic rays or another root cause.
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2015/05/05/boeing-787-power-is...
Which was an issue where the 787's Generator Control Units went into failsafe mode after being powered on for 248 days...
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In the sense that there's evidence of a problem with planes right now, and the question is if that problem was already there, whereas there's evidence of IDF war crimes right now, and the question is if they've always been doing them?
I think they meant in the sense of bad things happen to airplanes often enough that you could find what looks like a pattern for any given manufacturer if you looked for it, and bad things happen in armed conflict often enough that you could find what looks like a pattern for any given side in an armed conflict if you looked for it. Which isn't even to say that Israel and its armed forces are necessarily not behaving…
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Unless you're a pilot I'm not sure why anyone would expect that to be common knowledge. And it's insane such a system would ever be authorized IMO. That sounds like a hack to fix a memory leak or similarly some bug they can't figure out
I'm working on an aircraft program right now. We have a requirement to power cycle the plane every N days. It's in the manuals.
The 787 is full fly by wire. Was there actually a failure of the flight control system? So far, there's not much info. Overview of 787 control system.[1] [1] https://ioactive.com/reverse-engineers-perspective-on-the-bo...
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Yeah after the MCAS incident showing a kind of malice and the door blowout showing incompetency, I'm perfectly happy to start treating Boeing as guilty until proven innocent on these incidents. They haven't really been behaving in a way that they're worthy of giving them the benefit of the doubt. Until they start to show that they're changing their behavior (which they clearly didn't do after the MCAS incident) then…
I'm fine if you want to distrust or dislike or sanction Boeing. But that's not a good epistemology; it's not bringing you closer to understanding what's happening. It's also deeply incurious (as a rhetorical strategy, not as a belief system).
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Does it matter? At this stage it's just ridiculous that there's no more uproar towards Boeing or even direct intervention into it. Maybe because it's one of the 2 disfuntional members of the duopoly at the foundation of global air transit with massive geopolitical consequences if major changes are suggested.
It depends on whether you want to respond to stories like this with advocacy or understanding.
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74gear[1] on YouTube is a 747 Captain. It's a great aviation channel in general if anyone is interested in that stuff. He had mentioned two things that really illustrated to me your point a while back: A) Stuff breaks on planes. All the time. They are complex machines, but they typically have so many redundancies that unless there is a completely catastrophic failure, they are still perfectly safe to fly. An example:…
Yes but do the flight crew have the ability to tell if a plane is safe to fly? Without a deep understanding of the design of the plane they rely a lot on the metrics that the plane manufacturer display and on the manufacturers manuals to interpret them.
Do you have the ability to tell if a street is safe to cross?
Most of the time, yes.
Sometimes, you can't tell for sure, but you cross anyways.
Sometimes, you are dead wrong about your judgement. Shit happens. Nobody expects 100% certainty.
The problem here may be that Boeing may be falling to meet the expectation of 99.????% certainty, and regressing down to 99.????% certainty, due to a broken corporate culture.