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Comment by pinewurst | Hacker News Reader

The "1990s Computing Power" comment is ignorantly harsh. The MAX (to the best of my knowledge) uses a similar AMD29050-based architecture as the 777 (where it was pioneered) and the 737-800/900. It's amply fast and very very reliable, hardware and software (setting MCAS aside which is new to MAX).

Any sane person would prefer the solid well-proven choice over the bleeding edge. People used to make similar comments about the AGC and the Space Shuttle GPCs e.g. that such-and-such-a-PC-was-faster. Yeah, so what?

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I'm not sure I agree here.

There exist possibilities for far more safety with more compute.

For example, when a mechanical failure occurs (for example an engine explodes and partially falls off) the flight characteristics of the plane change dramatically. Current systems fall back to human control, and hope that human will be able to figure out how to control a now very "unique" machine.

Future systems could dynamically create new flight models based on collected data to be able to fly the machine in entirely new ways.

For an example of this, did you know it's possible to fully control a quadcopter even with 3 out of 4 rotors broken and no working fins/flaps? [1]. That sort of 'fly it how it has never been done before' is out of reach of human control, and might save lives.

[1]:. https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2013/12...

> For an example of this, did you know it's possible to fully control a quadcopter even with 3 out of 4 rotors broken and no working fins/flaps?

The linked article does not support your point, it shows a quadcopter losing one rotor which then goes into a kind of 'controlled fall', two (or even three) rotors is never mentioned and even the one rotor missing scenario involves the whole craft spinning (see video on the page).

This tech is just now making it into military aircraft in the F-35 (it’s designed to compensate for failures or combat damage while keeping the plane’s handling relatively consistent), so I would guess it’ll be a while before we see a civilian version.

"Figure out a way to fly the thing in the new, crippled configuration" is hard. Figure out a way that's better than what the human pilot came up with may be even harder.

It's hard, but it's a very measurable problem.

You randomly deform the airframe in a physics simulator, then get a real pilot to try to fly the simulated damaged airframe to the nearest airport.

You then get an AI to try doing the same.

As soon as the AI manages to get to the airport more often than the human, the tech will save lives, on average.

My guess is a PhD student could come up with an AI passing the above test inside a year. Yet aviation standards are stringent enough AI will be decades away from production use, if ever.

Your link to ZTE trumpeting the success of an algorithm helping an actual physical model of a quadcopter with a disabled rotor operating in lab conditions to crashland a bit more softly might be interpreted as a hint that the general case of safely landing a stricken aircraft is the sort of problem that probably isn't solved by a single PhD in a year...

Keeping those with enough hubris to say "yeah, shouldn't take long if we've got some sort of sort of simulator to devise scenarios for a neural network to overfit to" about a wide range of failure modes that an entire field has spent decades studying well away from safety critical systems might be one of the more underappreciated aspects of tight regulation.

The political problem is that people still trust humans a lot more than they trust machines. So passengers would be nervous about being flown by an AI, even if the AI was safer.

There's some weird psychology behind this: human pilots/drivers/etc are seen by passengers as a personal proxy, with agency over any situation.

If you take away the proxy you take away the illusion of agency. Humans really do not like being put into situations where they believe they have no agency at all.

As AI gets smarter, this will become more and more of a problem, until there some kind of cultural shift because AI is obviously safer it's not even a question any more.

This may or may not happen.

There also exists possibilities for far more danger. As you increase compute, you can run more code, and build more complicated interdependent components that are more difficult to test, especially for the sort of unexpected scenarios that "dynamic" behaviour would warrant. You would basically have a whole new plane - the opposite of what the 737 MAX 8 was intended to be.

The "1990's Computer Power" comment is factually correct.

According to wikipedia, the AMD29000 processor was first released in 1988 and "In late 1995 AMD dropped development of the 29k..."

I'm not commenting on whether that's appropriate to be running your aircraft or not, but it does very much seem to be a 1990's CPU running approx 50mhz.

> The "1990s Computing Power" comment is ignorantly harsh.

I don't think so. You build a plane that's expected to run for decades -- if you put a 2010 computer in there now, it'll be 20 years old in 2030.

That 1990's computer was put there in the 90's, does that really make it more reliable?

The amount of processing that those computers do won’t increase over time, it stays the same. So why use something you won’t need?

Also, planes are extremely expensive so they don’t get thrown away, they get constant upgrades. The U2 spy plane is a good example: a 1950/60s airframe running with more modern instruments. So if the need arise they will upgrade those CPUs on the 737s.

Sometimes even the instruments are maintained. I know a consultant whose job is to repair bespoke factory and laboratory microcontrollers in situ. When we hired him he spent two weeks covering our lab in blueprints, two weeks troubleshooting, and one week programming. 25K to fix the device, but much cheaper than a new one.

> So why use something you won’t need?

The whole point of this issue that the technology and cockpit design is purposely 30 years old to prevent the need for re-certification not for safety issues.

I'm not suggesting technology be used that isn't needed; I'm just suggesting using the technology to make air travel safer and easier for pilots.

That so-called 1990s computer is probably a year old, embedded in a Honeywell module that’ll be available new for the next 15 years.

Of course. It's not literally a 1990's computer. But the idea that it's just somehow superior because the design is 3 decades old doesn't make any sense. 30 years ago it would have been new technology; so where was that same argument then?

It's had 3 decades of experience and bugfixes.

If new developing is happening, as it was in this case, that doesn't really matter. This problem was amplified by maintaining old technology, not mitigated by it.

I don’t agree. The failure(s) weren’t in the old stuff, they were in the poor and ultimately unsafe cover-up (for lack of a better word) of the new.

The CG change from the new engines specifically, being masked by new software, MCAS. The only old part culpable is the legacy 737 limit of 2 AoA sensors (with only 1 used for MCAS input (a new thing)).

If they had used the new technology available in other jets -- the pilots wouldn't have been sifting through paper manuals to find the problem. The would have an actual display.

And if they weren't trying so hard to purposely avoid modernizing the cockpit, the issue would have been avoided altogether.

The problem was the MCAS. That's new technology.

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