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> to avoid recertification they kept their old computer hardware from earlier 737 generations, This is unbelievably fucked

adrianN 7y ago
No, it's not. Certification is an extremely expensive process with dubious benefits for safety. Why would you change hardware that has worked fine if it can fulfill your requirements?
- vageli 7y ago
  > No, it's not. Certification is an extremely expensive process with dubious benefits for safety. Why would you change hardware that has worked fine if it can fulfill your requirements? Is it fair to say the hardware is fulfilling the requirements though?
- freehunter 7y ago
  Because it obviously did not work fine and does not fulfill the requirements. What seems to have dubious benefits for safety is lying to the regulators and shoehorning new processes into old technology. Because hundreds of people have died from that exact thing, just on this one airplane.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    The airplanes didn't crash because the computer was too slow. They crashed because safety critical data was read from a sensor without redundancies.
    - aurelwu 7y ago
      But now during simulations test pilots apparently found situations where the computer was too slow to handle their input in adequate time. So while the crash was not the caused by this problem, there seems to be a problem.
- _pmf_ 7y ago
  That's related to an issue often found in medical devices development: the certified toolchain contains errors, but you cannot use the newer version with fixed errors because it is not certified. Of course, the new toolchain passes the same certification suite as does the faulty one (because the certification body does only check the documentation for completeness and basic plausibility and does not have any means to test anything themselves), it's just that it isn't commercially viable to "buy the official stamp".
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  If the requirements were for it to buck like a bronco before slamming into the ground then I say job well done.

adrianN 7y ago

No, it's not. Certification is an extremely expensive process with dubious benefits for safety. Why would you change hardware that has worked fine if it can fulfill your requirements?

vageli 7y ago
> No, it's not. Certification is an extremely expensive process with dubious benefits for safety. Why would you change hardware that has worked fine if it can fulfill your requirements? Is it fair to say the hardware is fulfilling the requirements though?
freehunter 7y ago
Because it obviously did not work fine and does not fulfill the requirements. What seems to have dubious benefits for safety is lying to the regulators and shoehorning new processes into old technology. Because hundreds of people have died from that exact thing, just on this one airplane.
- adrianN 7y ago
  The airplanes didn't crash because the computer was too slow. They crashed because safety critical data was read from a sensor without redundancies.
  - aurelwu 7y ago
    But now during simulations test pilots apparently found situations where the computer was too slow to handle their input in adequate time. So while the crash was not the caused by this problem, there seems to be a problem.
_pmf_ 7y ago
That's related to an issue often found in medical devices development: the certified toolchain contains errors, but you cannot use the newer version with fixed errors because it is not certified. Of course, the new toolchain passes the same certification suite as does the faulty one (because the certification body does only check the documentation for completeness and basic plausibility and does not have any means to test anything themselves), it's just that it isn't commercially viable to "buy the official stamp".
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
If the requirements were for it to buck like a bronco before slamming into the ground then I say job well done.