Imagine if your bugfix process was broadcast to the world, every new IN added to spirateam et al, every new crash condition found by test/QA, every time the software failed in test, it got printed by news organizations the world over. This is world the 737MAX software people are living in, for this alone, they have my utmost respect.
I picture a labyrinth of outsourced spaghetti, with no real ownership anywhere. Would be very happy to be corrected here.
Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software
151–158 of 158 posts
Re: Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s essentially my point. Just finding simple code quality issues isn’t going to cut it, especially when you need hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware to even test the code against.
It doesn't hurt either.
And I also challenge you on "it doesn't hurt". Consider military adversaries developing targeted attacks against critical infrastructure because it's open sourced.
Re: Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't hurt either.
Open sourcing my MRI scans for the general public to read "doesn't hurt" either. Doesn't mean it's a worthwhile/valuable thing to do. And I also challenge you on "it doesn't hurt". Consider military adversaries developing targeted attacks against critical infrastructure because it's open sourced.
Re: Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
“The largest recipient of Marshall Plan money was the United Kingdom (receiving about 26% of the total), followed by France (18%) and West Germany (11%).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Since others may be curious, what the UK received under the Marshall Plan looks to be about 3x what they paid back under Lend-Lease. (Which in turn was maybe 10% of the cost of what was shipped.)
Re: Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open sourcing my MRI scans for the general public to read "doesn't hurt" either. Doesn't mean it's a worthwhile/valuable thing to do. And I also challenge you on "it doesn't hurt". Consider military adversaries developing targeted attacks against critical infrastructure because it's open sourced.
You should assume that military adversaries already have access to the source code. Spies are a thing.
This just isn’t a good idea. Full stop.
Re: Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine if your software had already killed a few hundred people. Boeing developers have been put in an untenable position and should consider walking out until management does the right thing and kills the plane.
The plane has no fundamental mechanical flaw, it has a software bug. The only flaw the plane had was being treated as 'just another 737'
> The only flaw the plane had was being treated as 'just another 737'
Passing as "just another 737" was the whole point of this plane. Which is why it should be scrapped. Boeing and its customers will scream? Tough - next time, build a plane in the proper way, so you don't kill people. If that means making a bit less money, well, money comes and goes.
Re: Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, although ARM came out of that and now look at that (...or your smartphone) so its not all a disaster. The Raspberry Pi is a spiritual successor which I am generally pleased to see. The RPi was I think partly responsible for a real Computer Science curriculum getting back into schools ... I hate to say it but I think it was Michael Gove that made this happen!
Arm Holdings is now owned by Japan's Softbank, because a Conservative (business-first) administration thought selling off the family silver was a fine idea. This is pretty typical of the UK government's approach to the computer hardware/software industry. Had the first business computer industry in Europe (anyone else remember the LEO line of mainframes?) and a promising software biz, of which only bits remain. (The…
Which kind of speaks to the prevalence of luck over design in favorable outcomes at any macro level. Too many small, randomly whirling bits, and they all need to line up just so.
Re: Latest 737 Max Fault That Alarmed Test Pilots Rooted in Software
#158Before upgrading to the latest Ubuntu, I like to wait for a few months until my friends confirm that it's for the better. I guess I would do the same for the MAX. I can't imagine what it must be like to be one of the first pilots to fly the MAX once the grounding is lifted. Can pilots refuse to fly a specific plane "for a few months, 'cause I have kids waiting for me home"?
There were almost 400 delivered by the time it was grounded, some of them in service since 2017. Yes there were two high profile failures and this failure rate is extremely out of the norm by the very stringent standards of aviation — but these are not sudden-unavoidable-death machines that gets sensationalized.
The probability of a total loss of an aircraft is basically proportional to either its flight hours or number of takeoffs and landings (which are (handwave) correlated (unless you are Aloha Airlines)). A fleet of thousands of planes (especially a 'mature' design), flying thousands of hours per year, in service for decades should have very few losses due to fundamental design issues. It would be nice to say it should be Assuming nothing else changed, at full fleet size, that would be over 30 losses a year, or well over 1000 losses over the fleet's lifetime. They misengineered the system by at least 3 orders of magnitude. This is, at the very least, profound professional and managerial negligence. I'm not not yet convinced it's not also criminal. At the very least, all management who touched this subsystem or were part of the no-new-training-at-any-cost push should have already been shown the door up to and including the CEO.
And yes, things _are_ being done and they are adding 'nines' to the reliability as quickly as they can, but again, they are starting from a subsystem that kills everybody on board every 800,000 flight hours or so.
They appear to be dishonest with the public (and perhaps themselves) about how much risk is eliminated with each change and, similarly, appear to not be factoring in that some of these changes introduce other risks and failure modes.
What we have here is a giant fucking mess and a management organization that fosters no confidence in its ability to navigate itself out of it. In the end, I do expect Boeing to somehow glue-gun 3 more 9's of reliability onto this airframe and stop bleeding valuation, but it won't be pretty and it probably won't be fast.