Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

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Oh, I quite agree that Boeing screwed up the MCAS software design and needs to fix it. My experience with designing safe systems at Boeing has led to a lot of design decisions in D. I often look at lists of common bugs in programs to see if I can find a way to design such bugs out of the programming language.

I also regularly tell people that if you don't have a plan for when your software fails, you're going to be sorry. In this case, the plan is for the pilots to follow the runaway trim procedure.

As for software people, do you have a backup plan for when the software goes berserk? No? Well, someday it will go berserk and delete all your files. Have a backup plan. Suing the software maker won't get your files back.

About 90% of pilot training is dealing with emergencies that are never supposed to happen. One of them is runaway trim. Nobody has a plan to dispense with pilots and rely totally on automation.

Walter, what puzzles me with your line of argumentation is the single minded focus on the pilots behavior and ignoring everything else including the fact that we know training manuals were inadequate and MCAS proofed to not be airworthy. As the still missing FAA and EASA certification shows. Including one near crash during simulator flights, conducted with an updated MCAS, hyper-trained crew that knew more or less what would happen in a protected environment.

The manual thing is such a canard.

The directive issued is literally just reminding pilots of a procedure they should already know - reset the trim to stabilize the plane and throw the cutout switch. The issue with MCAS changing how the plane performed was remediated by skills pilots should have irrespective of feature descriptions in a manual.

This yet again pushes the issue onto just the pilots. Anything but the planemaker. I agree with the GP, there's far too much apologism for boeing here.

I'm not an apologist for Boeing and that's a mischaracterization of what I'm saying (and I'd argue Walter as well.)

Especially as my field of commercial aerospace was vendor agnostic.

You do know that training manuals are covered by certification procedures, right? It's not a canard, it's a fact.

Yes. That's orthogonal to whether or not the manual defeciency should have stopped pilots from following the checklist they should have down to rote memory.

(Hint: it shouldn't.)

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