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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if all the car companies were competing against eachother on tech for brakes, seatbelts or how a steering wheel works.

Or Boeing and Airbus competing on fundamental safety aspects of flight.

Self driving should be a singular science with canonical baseline requirements and standards to how it should function and interact/react to the human environment.

So - this shouldn't be "news" - it should be the requirement to even play in the space.

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> Imagine if all the car companies were competing against eachother on tech for brakes, seatbelts or how a steering wheel works.

Except for the seatbelt, That’s how it went. Especially with Airbus and Boeing who have chosen completely different approaches to flight safety system.

different approaches ?

IIRC, in Airbus planes the pilot has no direct control. He gives inputs which are then accepted or rejected depending on what the computer thinks is safe; at take off you can pull the stick as much as you want, the computer will not let the tail hit the ground. In Boeing you have direct control but with better feedback on what’s going to happen.

It's an often repeated misconception, but in Airbus planes the pilot has full control of every single control surface of the plane. Disabling the flight enveloppe protection system is probably necessary if you want to tail strike, but it is perfectly doable.

What's interesting is that modern crash-rate statistics for the two companies are essentially the same, meaning there doesn't seem to be a superior choice of the two approaches

Or meaning that the machine-sourced crash rate is low enough that it's dominated by flight crew and weather factors.

And there were a lot of rival seat belt designs until Volvo hit on a really good one that's been the standard since https://www.arnoldclark.com/newsroom/265-why-volvo-gave-away...

Many people had to die for us to learn the safety aspects of flight (learning by failing)

Which is eactly what we have learned to NOT repeat. My statement is still valid - We now know that letting many people die in vehicle safety trial-and-error is a non-starter.

I often hear this stated as "regulations are written in blood".

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