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It's a high stakes technical problem that is caused by not addressing technical debt - something that the many of the HN readership sees on a daily basis in oth
by karthikb 8y ago
It's a high stakes technical problem that is caused by not addressing technical debt - something that the many of the HN readership sees on a daily basis in other domains.
MCAS was created as a way to compensate for instability caused by strapping large engines onto an aircraft not originally designed for it, as opposed to doing a redesign.
- madeofpalk 8y agoAlso there's the "sales/business people made the problem worse" angle as well that developers just love.
- js2 8y agoBut there's also risk in designing a whole new plane, which had been Boeing's original plan. I'm not convinced MCAS is the wrong engineering decision. And who's to say a new plane wouldn't have a similar type of pilot assist system... the trend is in that direction.
- snowwrestler 8y agoOk but the implicit assumption here is that a new design would not itself include all sorts of engineering trade offs between systems, maintenance, and pilot training, when in fact it would. The 787 was a ground-up new design and yet holds the distinction of the most recent previous instance of a full model grounding, over battery issues. Iterating on a proven airframe has a lot of advantages for aircraft design and it is common in the industry.