Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

> But by the way you're attacking people over small oversights in a comment I can't assume good faith from you.

The problem is not with any small oversights. The problem is with the attitude of your comment. You proposed that developers should should read a design book and that would prevent catastrophes. That is insulting.

Aviation is a mature field. People much more clever than you or me spent decades of their lives thinking deeply about how to make it safe. That includes the proper UX design of the systems involved. And they did a very, very good job at it. Aviation has an exemplary safety record, especially when contrasted with how inherently dangerous the activity is.

This means that all the low hanging fruits have been already picked. One can further increase safety of course. Nothing is perfect. But it requires very careful analyses, testing, and deep understanding to achieve very small wins.

This is the background we live in. In contrast to this your comment reads as "Everyone is an idiot. I know better. They should read this one book and it would save lives." It lacks humility. You don't even know what you don't know, and yet you act as if you possesses some deep insight the field lacks. At the same time you demonstrate your lack of knowledge with those small oversights you talk about. The problem is not the small oversights, but the momentous lack of humility.

>Aviation is a mature field. People much more clever than you or me spent decades of their lives thinking deeply about how to make it safe.

I know this, and I'm not saying there weren't clever people working on it. Maybe that came out wrong.

However I have worked on safety-critical systems in a mature industry (not aviation). And the maturity of the industry has IME often meant that a lot of the especially obvious low-hanging fruit are not looked at properly.

Overly bureaucratic processes and people that are too focused on their roles, means that especially a lot of those things that require empathy for the user and a bit of a wide-angle view get ignored until something happens.

This is a two-edged sword since institutions need the bureaucracy and processes to remember it the next time.

For example I'd be that a UX designer with empathy for the user would not put a touchscreen focused control into a car.

The lack of feedback makes it distracting which arguably cost a few lives already. But it's hard to measure without cameras observing people in the last seconds before the crash.

Since there's no numbers there's probably less of a pressure on automotive companies to make it safer. Bureaucratic companies don't work this way. They need to hurt in their profits first.

Yet almost all cars in the last ten years have a lot of touchscreen controls. Because it looks cool in the showroom, and Tesla already did it.

It's a really obvious safety issue. A really low-hanging fruit. But it's in the blind spot of the mature automotive industry.

>In fact I bet that if we dug into it we would find internal memos written by UX engineers pointing out exactly what you wrote, and other engineers in response pointing out that all those functions on the touch screens are “non safety critical”. I have seen those arguments often.

This is kind of the point I wanted to get at though, I've been in a few such meetings, and a lot of clever engineers will rubberstamp things that are outside their area because it's technically safe, but ignoring the human element. Even bringing up the human element often gets scoffed at, because "that's not what we do here".

I feel like the lack of a broad view on things is what bothers me the most about it. If more people had a broader view, these meetings might go differently.