6 ms·
Quick question, and this is meant sincerely and not flippantly: have you worked as an aviation or avionics engineer? The focus on error conditions is truly imp
by karmelapple 8y ago
Quick question, and this is meant sincerely and not flippantly: have you worked as an aviation or avionics engineer?
The focus on error conditions is truly impressive during the development of these systems. I’ve spent plenty of hours writing requirements, and writing and running tests, for cockpit software, and the sheer variety of error conditions tested is very high. Not that they’ll catch everything, but the idea that a single AOA sensor could cause the MCAS to fail seems like something that would have been analyzed and discussed by the engineers working on this.
- rbanffy 8y agoNo. I worked in other embedded control settings, but nothing as sensitive. I understand what you say, that the AOA sensor malfunction or misread should never cause MCAS to fail and that any such situation (misread, malfunction, excessive actuator response, etc) should have been spotted sooner, by someone among the many people involved in its design, all the way from sensor to servo, well before any passengers were carried in the aircraft but everything indicates otherwise if we assume good faith. It's very likely all flaws will be identified and corrected, but reality has a way to stress those vanishingly small probabilities. It's not impossible that a lot of very smart people who are dedicated to think about corner cases all day long will, eventually, let something important escape. We are all human and, in the end, everything is human error.