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Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

wsj.com

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Re: Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

#31

Post by redis_mlc »

clon wrote: post #5

Seems like a passive-aggressive PR scheme to still try to indirectly lay blame on the dead pilots. Despicable.

FYI: The Indonesian accident investigation report found the pilots, airline mechanics, and Boeing roughly equally at fault for the Lionair crash.

But it's reasonable to hold Boeing to a higher standard of excellence as an experienced aircraft mfg.

I'd like to learn more about the 31 pages of missing maintenance logs. That's a very big deal.

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773291951/pilots-ground-crew-...

Re: Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

#32

Post by ng7j5d9 »

Does anyone else miss the days when a single person could grok the design of a plane? Or a piece of software, or a car, or whatever?

Now every new car needs to have adaptive cruise control and anti-lock brakes and stability control and Apple CarPlay and over-the-air updates and who knows what else, so there are a ton of things that are hopefully well-behaved black boxes that people hopefully understand mostly correctly, but who knows what could go wrong in a rogue OTA update or something.

I'm not all that familiar with the aerospace industry, but this feels the same. Of course all of these components will be tested, but if no one understands the whole package, who knows what fearsome edge case awaits when Flight Safety Program 32 gets in a fight with Flap Threshold Control Program 3 or whatever.

Re: Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

#33

Post by Traster »

wutbrodo wrote: post #17

My knee jerk reaction to this is "more automation after an automation failure? Huh?". But whenever I think someone is being that stupid, it's always worth a second look, and it turns out the reality is more complex. This article[1] linked off of the OP goes into detail about their crashes. It describes a design philosophy that pushes robustness fully onto the pilot, expecting him to flawlessly stitch together indepen…

I think there's a different way to explore this idea. I don't think automation had anything to do with the crashes. The problem was that the pilots weren't trained to know what tools the planes were equiped with and how to use them. Those crashes are like when I accidentally open a file with vim. There's nothing wrong with me, there's nothing wrong with vim but how the hell am I meant to know to hit esc :q? The lesson is orthogonal to automation. The lesson is that the pilots need to know what each system does and how to operate it. If the resolve of Boeing is to push forward with automation without taking the role of the pilot seriously, then this is doomed to failure, because automated systems will fail, and pilots will have to step in. It'll be rare, but that's what pilots are there for. Indeed, the more you automate things, the more liability you're inviting on yourself, which should be worrying for Boeing.

Re: Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

#34

Post by jandrese »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #24
jandrese wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorithmic correctness won't necessarily help you if the root problem is bad sensor data.

Everyone knows what bad sensor data is until they have to write software to identify it.

That said, the way Boeing designed the MCAS is inexcusable. They actually had two sensors available, plus a full suite of other instruments and pilot inputs to cross reference and their solution is to only pay attention to a single sensor.

It was engineered like it was version 0.1 beta. When you realize that the -MAX crashes were very close to single fault accidents it's even more crazy. Normally to crash an airplane you need to thread the needle through multiple failure states thanks to redundancy and safe design. Simple single issue crashes are almost unheard of in the modern era thanks to decades of safety engineering. Aggressive cost engineering is returning us to the perilous air travel of the 40s and 50s.

Re: Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

#35

Post by mrtksn »

ng7j5d9 wrote: post #32

Does anyone else miss the days when a single person could grok the design of a plane? Or a piece of software, or a car, or whatever? Now every new car needs to have adaptive cruise control and anti-lock brakes and stability control and Apple CarPlay and over-the-air updates and who knows what else, so there are a ton of things that are hopefully well-behaved black boxes that people hopefully understand mostly correct…

I think in those days they needed to have an Engineer in addition to the pilots to fly it and the cars were very unsafe and unreliable.

Re: Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

#37

Post by phkahler »

logfromblammo wrote: post #25

"Our automated system crashed several planes, when the pilots were not able to disable it before it could erroneously trim the vehicle into terrain. "Clearly, we need to remove the human pilots and double down on the automation." [This is where the people using shallow analysis go nuts. But wait.] Because the flawed system was only installed for the purpose of avoiding the expense of retraining human pilots to a new…

>> Because the flawed system was only installed for the purpose of avoiding the expense of retraining human pilots to a new model of aircraft!

I'm not sure that's the only reason. Otherwise they should have started building them without MCAS and retraining pilots several months ago. That seems far simpler/cheaper than whatever they're doing now.

Re: Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

#38

Post by bhouston »

Fully automated flight is the far future. The question is how near future is it?

I think Boeing and Airbus have such long delays between project initiation and delivery that planning now to deliver a fully automated flight system in 10 years is likely in the realm of reasonable?

Re: Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

#39

Post by ng7j5d9 »

mrtksn wrote: post #35
ng7j5d9 wrote: post #32

Does anyone else miss the days when a single person could grok the design of a plane? Or a piece of software, or a car, or whatever? Now every new car needs to have adaptive cruise control and anti-lock brakes and stability control and Apple CarPlay and over-the-air updates and who knows what else, so there are a ton of things that are hopefully well-behaved black boxes that people hopefully understand mostly correct…

I think in those days they needed to have an Engineer in addition to the pilots to fly it and the cars were very unsafe and unreliable.

That's a great point. Air travel has gotten measurably safer and people survive car accidents at much greater rates.

I guess there's just something more "understandable" about a plane crashing due to an engine failure rather than software fighting the pilot. Or it's more understandable when someone died in a car crash because they couldn't control a skid rather than Autopilot driving into a concrete barrier it avoided previously because something inscrutable in the programming changed.

Perhaps we're heading towards a world with on average better, but less well-understood, outcomes.

Re: Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

#40

Post by mrtksn »

ng7j5d9 wrote: post #39
mrtksn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in those days they needed to have an Engineer in addition to the pilots to fly it and the cars were very unsafe and unreliable.

That's a great point. Air travel has gotten measurably safer and people survive car accidents at much greater rates. I guess there's just something more "understandable" about a plane crashing due to an engine failure rather than software fighting the pilot. Or it's more understandable when someone died in a car crash because they couldn't control a skid rather than Autopilot driving into a concrete barrier it avoide…

I agree but we can still reason with the current systems in use. MCAS crashing planes is not that different from metal fatigue IMO. In both cases, we can look back and say "Okay, that's how it happened and we screwed up because we made a design mistake" which is very different from Autopilot driving into concrete barriers because that's a very high-level mistake.

We wouldn't have a problem with the software not recognising barriers or mistake road lines correctly as long as this software doesn't claim to be able to handle high-level decisions and fail on something extremely obvious to humans leading to great damages.

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