A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

This to me is the biggest difference between writing code for the software industry vs. an industrial industry.

Software is all about the happy path ("move fast and break things") because the consequences typically range from a minor inconvenience to a major financial loss.

Industrial control is all about sad paths ("what happens if someone drives a forklift into your favorite junction box during the most critical, exothermic phase of some reaction") because the consequences usually start at a major financial loss and top out in "Modern Marvels - Engineering Disasters" territory.

Like what’s the secret sauce of nvidia vs radeon or AMD vs intel? Reliable execution, seemingly - and this is an environment where failures are supposed to be contained to very specific rates at given levels of severity.

The FAA has gotten into a mode where they let boeing sign off on their own deviations from the rules, the engine changes forced the introduction of the nose-pusher-down system which really should have required training, but Boeing didn't want to do that, because the whole point of doing the weird engine thing was having ostensible "airframe compatibility" despite the changes in flight characteristics. And they have become so large (like intel) that they don’t have to care anymore, because they know there’s no chance of actual regulatory consequences, nor can the EAA kick them out without causing a diplomatic incident and massively disrupting air travel, so they are no longer rigorous, and we simply have to deal with Boeing’s “meltdown”.

And yes they should be doing better but in the abstract, certification processes always need to be dealing with “uncooperative” participants who may want to conceal derogatory information or pencil-whip certification. You need to build processes that don’t let that happen and nowadays there’s so much of a revolving door that they can just get away with it. Like none of this would have happened with the classified personnel certification process etc - it is fundamentally a problem of a corrupted and ineffective certification process.

This decline in certification led to an inevitable decline in quality. When companies figure out it’s a paper tiger then there’s no reason to spend the money to do good engineering.

The FAA’s processes are both too strict and too lax - we have moved into the regulatory capture phase where they purely serve the interests of the industry giants who are already established and consolidated, and they now serve primarily to exclude any competitors rather than ensure consistent quality of engineering.

The specifics are less interesting than that high-level problem - there obviously eventually would be some form of engineering malfeasance that resulted from regulatory capture, the specific form is less important than the forces that produced it. And that regulatory capture problem exists across basically the whole American system. Why do we have forced arbitration on everything, why are our trains dumping poison into our towns? Because from 1980-2020 we basically handed control of legislative policy over to corporate interests and then allowed a massive degree of consolidation. Not that airbus is small, but the EAA isn’t regulatory capture to the extent of most American bureaus.