5 ms·

Max Crashes Strengthen Resolve of Boeing to Automate Flight

24 points by Bostonian 7y ago

pstrateman 7y ago
Their automated systems caused two crashes and their solution is to automate more systems? Have they literally gone insane?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  This article[1] linked off of the OP goes into detail about their crashes. It describes a design philosophy that pushes robustness fully onto the pilot, expecting him to flawlessly stitch together independent automated systems and unreasonably rapidly interpret and react to their error modes. In the case described in the article, separate automated systems had contrasting views of the world, and shouted their contradictory errors at the pilots, relying on them to be able to instantly reconcile these models and figure out what the root problem was. (In this case, a specific sensor failure made a single system think the plane was pointed up, and this system made the isolated decision to push the nose downwards while warning that the nose was too high. Naturally, other systems simultaneously complained about the nosedive). One solution, of course, is to remove automated systems from planes. But assuming they provide any value (I don't think this is in dispute?): another, more reasonable strategy is to commit more fully to an automated system design that is intentionally fault-tolerant, robust to system and sensor errors, and has a more complete view of the plane's world. Instead of requiring the overall state of the meta-system to be lossily communicated to humans in a time-critical emergency, the newer designs are intended to use all the information available to the plane's systems to reconcile subcompoments' contradictory view of the world. Note that this doesn't preclude human control at all: if anything, it makes pilot control _safer_, since the system can provide a coherent view to the pilot in a way that's currently impossible. I don't know enough about large aircraft operation to fully comment on the wisdom of this approach, but it's substantially more complex than "auto system failed, why would they expand use". [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-four-second-catastrophe-how-boeing-doomed-the-737-max-11565966629 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-four-second-catastrophe-how...
  - tehjoker 7y ago
    The auto system failed because they a) were band-aiding a flawed mechanical design b) under-designed the compensating software (only provided a single AOA sensor by default) to obscure the fact the plane was significantly different to avoid training costs. These are management problems, not technical problems. More automation would be subject to the same issues.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      Crap I meant to make the above comment as a top level comment, not a response.. Somehow it came through twice. Anyway, in response to your comment: perhaps I'm conflating these, but a commitment to robustness seems like it's included in the newer philosophy? It just extends that notion beyond the sensor-level to the system level. Sure, you can frame an inadequate emphasis on robustness as a "management problem" instead of a technical one, but that seems equally applicable to the "management solution" being put forth, no?
      - tehjoker 7y ago
        I would say that framing a business problem in engineering terms will lead to an unclear understanding of the problem. The executives were attempting to thread the needle of a potentially business killing competition with Airbus and were willing to make compromises to safety to save their skins. No engineering methodology can save you from motivated reasoning and systems level problems like that because management will force exceptions to whatever process is in place. The only thing that would be an appropriate counterweight is if the engineering staff refuses to put a defective design into production. A robust engineering process can make violations and exceptions clear, but if the staff still does what management says, it won't help.
  - fgonzag 7y ago
    The problem is we don't trust Boeing to develop these automated systems, considering they developed a system with enough authority to crash the plane into the ground. essentially 0 sensor redundancy (alternating between sensors is non-redundant)
turndown 7y ago
For the life of me, I have absolutely no idea how you can look at what has happened with the Max and believe that more entrenched automation is the answer.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Yeah, my thought was "Do the Boeing execs actually know why the -MAX crashes happened?" Holy crap the very first paragraph is opposite-of-reality.txt > Boeing Co. is increasingly committed to transferring more control of aircraft from pilots to computers after two crashes exposed flaws in an automated system on its 737 MAX that overpowered aviators in the disasters. The whole problem was the computer overriding the best efforts of the pilots until the planes nosed into the ground.
- dnautics 7y ago
  At the very least, entrenched automation by Boeing.
- AlDeeMer 7y ago
  Exactly what I'm thinking.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  What's the logic behind this statement? Airbus is known for its automation, they had some rough times but now they are doing very well. If anything, the most prominent crash that comes to mind from recent history of 737s equivalent a320 is the suicidal pilot of Airberlin. I would love it when the planes are as easily operated as an elevator. It's probably more realistic than self-driving cars.
- Retric 7y ago
  The argument goes something like this: It’s the disconnect between pilots mental models of what’s going on and what’s actually going on that caused the Max‘s and several other related crashes on different aircraft. As such software designed based on how the system actually works may actually be both simpler and safer than increasingly abstracted fly by wire systems trying to safely intuit what the pilots want. An example from 10 years ago: https://www.fastcompany.com/1669720/how-lousy-cockpit-design-crashed-an-airbus-killing-228-people https://www.fastcompany.com/1669720/how-lousy-cockpit-design...
clon 7y ago
Seems like a passive-aggressive PR scheme to still try to indirectly lay blame on the dead pilots. Despicable.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  FYI: The Indonesian accident investigation report found the pilots, airline mechanics, and Boeing roughly equally at fault for the Lionair crash. But it's reasonable to hold Boeing to a higher standard of excellence as an experienced aircraft mfg. I'd like to learn more about the 31 pages of missing maintenance logs. That's a very big deal. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773291951/pilots-ground-crew-share-blame-for-lion-air-737-max-crash-indonesian-report-says https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773291951/pilots-ground-crew-...
senordevnyc 7y ago
My initial thought was it’s crazy to reach for more automation in the wake of automation-involved fatalities, but if I step back and think about it, they’re not wrong. There’s no way that piloting aircraft is going to become a more manual process. More automation is a given in the future. And since so much of the dangers of automation seem to be in the gray zone where it’s an opaque mix between human and computer, it makes sense to cut humans out of the loop as soon as possible.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I would've agreed with this stance before the Boeing disaster. Granted there are many things that could be (could have been) done to address the fragility of the 737 Max's automatic system, but the point is they weren't. And I don't know who in the world is going to trust Boeing to take over more parts of the piloting process, because they'll probably be executed just as badly.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sansnomme 7y ago
There are tons of math majors produced every year. Would be a viable business model to offer factory-style program-correctness-proving-as-a-service. Current proof services are mostly niche static analysis for stuff like Ethereum contracts and occasionally a wannabe legal-tech company. I think aerospace could use more proofs. You can't use Ada for everything, eventually you will have to code in C/C++.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Algorithmic correctness won't necessarily help you if the root problem is bad sensor data.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    Everyone knows what bad sensor data is until they have to write software to identify it.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      That said, the way Boeing designed the MCAS is inexcusable. They actually had two sensors available, plus a full suite of other instruments and pilot inputs to cross reference and their solution is to only pay attention to a single sensor. It was engineered like it was version 0.1 beta. When you realize that the -MAX crashes were very close to single fault accidents it's even more crazy. Normally to crash an airplane you need to thread the needle through multiple failure states thanks to redundancy and safe design. Simple single issue crashes are almost unheard of in the modern era thanks to decades of safety engineering. Aggressive cost engineering is returning us to the perilous air travel of the 40s and 50s.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- clon 7y ago
  As far as I have been able to gather, the MCAS software performed exactly to spec. You may have been drawn to the Boeing straw man narrative "the software was faulty (we can fix it)".
philwelch 7y ago
To be fair, I don't think more automation is a bad idea here. The bad idea is Boeing continuing to design and manufacture aircraft.
wutbrodo 7y ago
My knee jerk reaction to this is "more automation after an automation failure? Huh?". But whenever I think someone is being that stupid, it's always worth a second look, and it turns out the reality is more complex. This article[1] linked off of the OP goes into detail about their crashes. It describes a design philosophy that pushes robustness fully onto the pilot, expecting him to flawlessly stitch together independent automated systems and unreasonably rapidly interpret and react to their error modes. In the case described in the article, separate automated systems had contrasting views of the world, and shouted their contradictory errors at the pilots, relying on them to be able to instantly reconcile these models and figure out what the root problem was. (In this case, a specific sensor failure made a single system think the plane was pointed up, and this system made the isolated decision to push the nose downwards while warning that the nose was too high. Naturally, other systems simultaneously complained about the nosedive). One solution, of course, is to remove automated systems from planes. But assuming they provide any value (I don't think this is in dispute?): another, more reasonable strategy is to commit more fully to an automated system design that is intentionally fault-tolerant, robust to system and sensor errors, and has a more complete view of the plane's world. Instead of requiring the overall state of the meta-system to be lossily communicated to humans in a time-critical emergency, the newer designs are intended to use all the information available to the plane's systems to reconcile subcompoments' contradictory view of the world. Note that this doesn't preclude human control at all: if anything, it makes pilot control _safer_, since the system can provide a coherent view to the pilot in a way that's currently impossible. I don't know enough about large aircraft operation to fully comment on the wisdom of this approach, but it's substantially more complex than "auto system failed, why would they expand use". [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-four-second-catastrophe-how-boeing-doomed-the-737-max-11565966629 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-four-second-catastrophe-how...
- phkahler 7y ago
  As a student pilot in a Cessna, I kept thinking how much even simple automation could help. Why do I need to deal with carb heat for example. The answer in almost every case is that things are simpler and probably safer the way they are. Once you start down the automation path, you also want fail-safe redundancy and systems that cooperate with each other when there is a problem. I can see how it can quickly get out of hand. The more complex something gets, the harder it is for human to intervene when there's a problem. I can now argue either way about it.
newnewpdro 7y ago
Somebody please take away Boeing's shovel already.
mattrp 7y ago
I don’t think it’s a mistake that the headline is intended to make Boeing sound uncaring and wrong-headed. The headline is intended to provoke discussion. However, if you pick almost any problem in any industry, the solution invariably is less human / more automated. It’s not hard to see how we got here - I can imagine when Boeing asks pilots what they need the answer is something like reduce distractions so we can fly. How do you do that? More automation. Take almost any operational role - everyone is asking to reduce distractions and highlight things that need focus. I’m not arguing to absolve Boeing from fielding the Max. But I can also see a logical argument here.
norto_flight 7y ago
Way to introduce a false dichtonomy into the public conversation to save the company from scrutinity. More or less automation is irrelevant to the conversation and even with all goodwill, was never the motivating factor for Boeing designing the MAX system as it did. Don't be blended by this PR spin!
logfromblammo 7y ago
"Our automated system crashed several planes, when the pilots were not able to disable it before it could erroneously trim the vehicle into terrain. "Clearly, we need to remove the human pilots and double down on the automation." [This is where the people using shallow analysis go nuts. But wait.] Because the flawed system was only installed for the purpose of avoiding the expense of retraining human pilots to a new model of aircraft! In a fully-integrated automated piloting system, there is no separate trim-compensating subsystem. The trim parameters are plugged directly into the aircraft model, and the automatic pilot has access to all the sensors in the craft to make its trim decisions, instead of just the angle-of-attack sensor. Instead of re-certifying hundreds of pilots, you just validate one new aircraft data model.
- phkahler 7y ago
  >> Because the flawed system was only installed for the purpose of avoiding the expense of retraining human pilots to a new model of aircraft! I'm not sure that's the only reason. Otherwise they should have started building them without MCAS and retraining pilots several months ago. That seems far simpler/cheaper than whatever they're doing now.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    They should have put the new engines on a new airframe with more ground clearance under the wings, that would not have required the heavy engines to be pushed forward and change the center of gravity in order to fit. Such an aircraft would no longer be considered a 737 for the purposes of pilot certification. The whole thing was motivated by that. Pretend it's the same plane, so that the pilots can pretend to know how to fly it. It's analogous to hiring a Java or C# applications software developer when your codebase is actually in a proprietary variant of C++. It's close enough that they think they can code in it, but no one ever mentioned how the memory management subsystem is actually just a library written by Dave, who left the company in 2004, and if you aren't careful to clean up your references correctly (according to Dave), the biweekly analysis run will crash-to-desktop in the 14th hour, and you will be called by a panicked twentysomething at 5 AM on a Saturday. Then you find out about the custom compiler (also Dave), and start sending out resumes before it's too late. But with pilots, there's no one else to send the resume to.
ng7j5d9 7y ago
Does anyone else miss the days when a single person could grok the design of a plane? Or a piece of software, or a car, or whatever? Now every new car needs to have adaptive cruise control and anti-lock brakes and stability control and Apple CarPlay and over-the-air updates and who knows what else, so there are a ton of things that are hopefully well-behaved black boxes that people hopefully understand mostly correctly, but who knows what could go wrong in a rogue OTA update or something. I'm not all that familiar with the aerospace industry, but this feels the same. Of course all of these components will be tested, but if no one understands the whole package, who knows what fearsome edge case awaits when Flight Safety Program 32 gets in a fight with Flap Threshold Control Program 3 or whatever.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  I think in those days they needed to have an Engineer in addition to the pilots to fly it and the cars were very unsafe and unreliable.
  - ng7j5d9 7y ago
    That's a great point. Air travel has gotten measurably safer and people survive car accidents at much greater rates. I guess there's just something more "understandable" about a plane crashing due to an engine failure rather than software fighting the pilot. Or it's more understandable when someone died in a car crash because they couldn't control a skid rather than Autopilot driving into a concrete barrier it avoided previously because something inscrutable in the programming changed. Perhaps we're heading towards a world with on average better, but less well-understood, outcomes.
    - mrtksn 7y ago
      I agree but we can still reason with the current systems in use. MCAS crashing planes is not that different from metal fatigue IMO. In both cases, we can look back and say "Okay, that's how it happened and we screwed up because we made a design mistake" which is very different from Autopilot driving into concrete barriers because that's a very high-level mistake. We wouldn't have a problem with the software not recognising barriers or mistake road lines correctly as long as this software doesn't claim to be able to handle high-level decisions and fail on something extremely obvious to humans leading to great damages.
bhouston 7y ago
Fully automated flight is the far future. The question is how near future is it? I think Boeing and Airbus have such long delays between project initiation and delivery that planning now to deliver a fully automated flight system in 10 years is likely in the realm of reasonable?
ilaksh 7y ago
I think more or better automation makes sense. However, in this case, they are just trying a new tactic to deflect blame. The fundamental problem was that they had new requirements and instead of allowing the engineers to create a new design, management wanted to save money so insisted the engineers shoehorn the new requirements into the old design with hacks resulting in a plane that was fundamentally unstable and ending with hundreds of people dying. The solution to that problem is to have several executives from Boeing and the FAA in prison. Then break Boeing down and rebuild it as an engineering organization. After that, yes, continue increasing the automation.

24 points by Bostonian 7y ago

Their automated systems caused two crashes and their solution is to automate more systems? Have they literally gone insane?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wutbrodo 7y ago
This article[1] linked off of the OP goes into detail about their crashes. It describes a design philosophy that pushes robustness fully onto the pilot, expecting him to flawlessly stitch together independent automated systems and unreasonably rapidly interpret and react to their error modes. In the case described in the article, separate automated systems had contrasting views of the world, and shouted their contradictory errors at the pilots, relying on them to be able to instantly reconcile these models and figure out what the root problem was. (In this case, a specific sensor failure made a single system think the plane was pointed up, and this system made the isolated decision to push the nose downwards while warning that the nose was too high. Naturally, other systems simultaneously complained about the nosedive). One solution, of course, is to remove automated systems from planes. But assuming they provide any value (I don't think this is in dispute?): another, more reasonable strategy is to commit more fully to an automated system design that is intentionally fault-tolerant, robust to system and sensor errors, and has a more complete view of the plane's world. Instead of requiring the overall state of the meta-system to be lossily communicated to humans in a time-critical emergency, the newer designs are intended to use all the information available to the plane's systems to reconcile subcompoments' contradictory view of the world. Note that this doesn't preclude human control at all: if anything, it makes pilot control _safer_, since the system can provide a coherent view to the pilot in a way that's currently impossible. I don't know enough about large aircraft operation to fully comment on the wisdom of this approach, but it's substantially more complex than "auto system failed, why would they expand use". [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-four-second-catastrophe-how-boeing-doomed-the-737-max-11565966629 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-four-second-catastrophe-how...
- tehjoker 7y ago
  The auto system failed because they a) were band-aiding a flawed mechanical design b) under-designed the compensating software (only provided a single AOA sensor by default) to obscure the fact the plane was significantly different to avoid training costs. These are management problems, not technical problems. More automation would be subject to the same issues.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    Crap I meant to make the above comment as a top level comment, not a response.. Somehow it came through twice. Anyway, in response to your comment: perhaps I'm conflating these, but a commitment to robustness seems like it's included in the newer philosophy? It just extends that notion beyond the sensor-level to the system level. Sure, you can frame an inadequate emphasis on robustness as a "management problem" instead of a technical one, but that seems equally applicable to the "management solution" being put forth, no?
    - tehjoker 7y ago
      I would say that framing a business problem in engineering terms will lead to an unclear understanding of the problem. The executives were attempting to thread the needle of a potentially business killing competition with Airbus and were willing to make compromises to safety to save their skins. No engineering methodology can save you from motivated reasoning and systems level problems like that because management will force exceptions to whatever process is in place. The only thing that would be an appropriate counterweight is if the engineering staff refuses to put a defective design into production. A robust engineering process can make violations and exceptions clear, but if the staff still does what management says, it won't help.
- fgonzag 7y ago
  The problem is we don't trust Boeing to develop these automated systems, considering they developed a system with enough authority to crash the plane into the ground. essentially 0 sensor redundancy (alternating between sensors is non-redundant)

turndown 7y ago

For the life of me, I have absolutely no idea how you can look at what has happened with the Max and believe that more entrenched automation is the answer.

jandrese 7y ago
Yeah, my thought was "Do the Boeing execs actually know why the -MAX crashes happened?" Holy crap the very first paragraph is opposite-of-reality.txt > Boeing Co. is increasingly committed to transferring more control of aircraft from pilots to computers after two crashes exposed flaws in an automated system on its 737 MAX that overpowered aviators in the disasters. The whole problem was the computer overriding the best efforts of the pilots until the planes nosed into the ground.
dnautics 7y ago
At the very least, entrenched automation by Boeing.
AlDeeMer 7y ago
Exactly what I'm thinking.
mrtksn 7y ago
What's the logic behind this statement? Airbus is known for its automation, they had some rough times but now they are doing very well. If anything, the most prominent crash that comes to mind from recent history of 737s equivalent a320 is the suicidal pilot of Airberlin. I would love it when the planes are as easily operated as an elevator. It's probably more realistic than self-driving cars.
Retric 7y ago
The argument goes something like this: It’s the disconnect between pilots mental models of what’s going on and what’s actually going on that caused the Max‘s and several other related crashes on different aircraft. As such software designed based on how the system actually works may actually be both simpler and safer than increasingly abstracted fly by wire systems trying to safely intuit what the pilots want. An example from 10 years ago: https://www.fastcompany.com/1669720/how-lousy-cockpit-design-crashed-an-airbus-killing-228-people https://www.fastcompany.com/1669720/how-lousy-cockpit-design...

clon 7y ago

Seems like a passive-aggressive PR scheme to still try to indirectly lay blame on the dead pilots. Despicable.

redis_mlc 7y ago
FYI: The Indonesian accident investigation report found the pilots, airline mechanics, and Boeing roughly equally at fault for the Lionair crash. But it's reasonable to hold Boeing to a higher standard of excellence as an experienced aircraft mfg. I'd like to learn more about the 31 pages of missing maintenance logs. That's a very big deal. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773291951/pilots-ground-crew-share-blame-for-lion-air-737-max-crash-indonesian-report-says https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773291951/pilots-ground-crew-...

senordevnyc 7y ago

My initial thought was it’s crazy to reach for more automation in the wake of automation-involved fatalities, but if I step back and think about it, they’re not wrong. There’s no way that piloting aircraft is going to become a more manual process. More automation is a given in the future. And since so much of the dangers of automation seem to be in the gray zone where it’s an opaque mix between human and computer, it makes sense to cut humans out of the loop as soon as possible.

_bxg1 7y ago
I would've agreed with this stance before the Boeing disaster. Granted there are many things that could be (could have been) done to address the fragility of the 737 Max's automatic system, but the point is they weren't. And I don't know who in the world is going to trust Boeing to take over more parts of the piloting process, because they'll probably be executed just as badly.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sansnomme 7y ago

There are tons of math majors produced every year. Would be a viable business model to offer factory-style program-correctness-proving-as-a-service. Current proof services are mostly niche static analysis for stuff like Ethereum contracts and occasionally a wannabe legal-tech company. I think aerospace could use more proofs. You can't use Ada for everything, eventually you will have to code in C/C++.

jandrese 7y ago
Algorithmic correctness won't necessarily help you if the root problem is bad sensor data.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  Everyone knows what bad sensor data is until they have to write software to identify it.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    That said, the way Boeing designed the MCAS is inexcusable. They actually had two sensors available, plus a full suite of other instruments and pilot inputs to cross reference and their solution is to only pay attention to a single sensor. It was engineered like it was version 0.1 beta. When you realize that the -MAX crashes were very close to single fault accidents it's even more crazy. Normally to crash an airplane you need to thread the needle through multiple failure states thanks to redundancy and safe design. Simple single issue crashes are almost unheard of in the modern era thanks to decades of safety engineering. Aggressive cost engineering is returning us to the perilous air travel of the 40s and 50s.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
clon 7y ago
As far as I have been able to gather, the MCAS software performed exactly to spec. You may have been drawn to the Boeing straw man narrative "the software was faulty (we can fix it)".

philwelch 7y ago

To be fair, I don't think more automation is a bad idea here. The bad idea is Boeing continuing to design and manufacture aircraft.

wutbrodo 7y ago

My knee jerk reaction to this is "more automation after an automation failure? Huh?". But whenever I think someone is being that stupid, it's always worth a second look, and it turns out the reality is more complex. This article[1] linked off of the OP goes into detail about their crashes. It describes a design philosophy that pushes robustness fully onto the pilot, expecting him to flawlessly stitch together independent automated systems and unreasonably rapidly interpret and react to their error modes. In the case described in the article, separate automated systems had contrasting views of the world, and shouted their contradictory errors at the pilots, relying on them to be able to instantly reconcile these models and figure out what the root problem was. (In this case, a specific sensor failure made a single system think the plane was pointed up, and this system made the isolated decision to push the nose downwards while warning that the nose was too high. Naturally, other systems simultaneously complained about the nosedive). One solution, of course, is to remove automated systems from planes. But assuming they provide any value (I don't think this is in dispute?): another, more reasonable strategy is to commit more fully to an automated system design that is intentionally fault-tolerant, robust to system and sensor errors, and has a more complete view of the plane's world. Instead of requiring the overall state of the meta-system to be lossily communicated to humans in a time-critical emergency, the newer designs are intended to use all the information available to the plane's systems to reconcile subcompoments' contradictory view of the world. Note that this doesn't preclude human control at all: if anything, it makes pilot control _safer_, since the system can provide a coherent view to the pilot in a way that's currently impossible. I don't know enough about large aircraft operation to fully comment on the wisdom of this approach, but it's substantially more complex than "auto system failed, why would they expand use". [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-four-second-catastrophe-how-boeing-doomed-the-737-max-11565966629 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-four-second-catastrophe-how...

phkahler 7y ago
As a student pilot in a Cessna, I kept thinking how much even simple automation could help. Why do I need to deal with carb heat for example. The answer in almost every case is that things are simpler and probably safer the way they are. Once you start down the automation path, you also want fail-safe redundancy and systems that cooperate with each other when there is a problem. I can see how it can quickly get out of hand. The more complex something gets, the harder it is for human to intervene when there's a problem. I can now argue either way about it.

newnewpdro 7y ago

Somebody please take away Boeing's shovel already.

mattrp 7y ago

I don’t think it’s a mistake that the headline is intended to make Boeing sound uncaring and wrong-headed. The headline is intended to provoke discussion. However, if you pick almost any problem in any industry, the solution invariably is less human / more automated. It’s not hard to see how we got here - I can imagine when Boeing asks pilots what they need the answer is something like reduce distractions so we can fly. How do you do that? More automation. Take almost any operational role - everyone is asking to reduce distractions and highlight things that need focus. I’m not arguing to absolve Boeing from fielding the Max. But I can also see a logical argument here.

norto_flight 7y ago

Way to introduce a false dichtonomy into the public conversation to save the company from scrutinity. More or less automation is irrelevant to the conversation and even with all goodwill, was never the motivating factor for Boeing designing the MAX system as it did. Don't be blended by this PR spin!

logfromblammo 7y ago

"Our automated system crashed several planes, when the pilots were not able to disable it before it could erroneously trim the vehicle into terrain. "Clearly, we need to remove the human pilots and double down on the automation." [This is where the people using shallow analysis go nuts. But wait.] Because the flawed system was only installed for the purpose of avoiding the expense of retraining human pilots to a new model of aircraft! In a fully-integrated automated piloting system, there is no separate trim-compensating subsystem. The trim parameters are plugged directly into the aircraft model, and the automatic pilot has access to all the sensors in the craft to make its trim decisions, instead of just the angle-of-attack sensor. Instead of re-certifying hundreds of pilots, you just validate one new aircraft data model.

phkahler 7y ago
>> Because the flawed system was only installed for the purpose of avoiding the expense of retraining human pilots to a new model of aircraft! I'm not sure that's the only reason. Otherwise they should have started building them without MCAS and retraining pilots several months ago. That seems far simpler/cheaper than whatever they're doing now.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  They should have put the new engines on a new airframe with more ground clearance under the wings, that would not have required the heavy engines to be pushed forward and change the center of gravity in order to fit. Such an aircraft would no longer be considered a 737 for the purposes of pilot certification. The whole thing was motivated by that. Pretend it's the same plane, so that the pilots can pretend to know how to fly it. It's analogous to hiring a Java or C# applications software developer when your codebase is actually in a proprietary variant of C++. It's close enough that they think they can code in it, but no one ever mentioned how the memory management subsystem is actually just a library written by Dave, who left the company in 2004, and if you aren't careful to clean up your references correctly (according to Dave), the biweekly analysis run will crash-to-desktop in the 14th hour, and you will be called by a panicked twentysomething at 5 AM on a Saturday. Then you find out about the custom compiler (also Dave), and start sending out resumes before it's too late. But with pilots, there's no one else to send the resume to.

ng7j5d9 7y ago

Does anyone else miss the days when a single person could grok the design of a plane? Or a piece of software, or a car, or whatever? Now every new car needs to have adaptive cruise control and anti-lock brakes and stability control and Apple CarPlay and over-the-air updates and who knows what else, so there are a ton of things that are hopefully well-behaved black boxes that people hopefully understand mostly correctly, but who knows what could go wrong in a rogue OTA update or something. I'm not all that familiar with the aerospace industry, but this feels the same. Of course all of these components will be tested, but if no one understands the whole package, who knows what fearsome edge case awaits when Flight Safety Program 32 gets in a fight with Flap Threshold Control Program 3 or whatever.

mrtksn 7y ago
I think in those days they needed to have an Engineer in addition to the pilots to fly it and the cars were very unsafe and unreliable.
- ng7j5d9 7y ago
  That's a great point. Air travel has gotten measurably safer and people survive car accidents at much greater rates. I guess there's just something more "understandable" about a plane crashing due to an engine failure rather than software fighting the pilot. Or it's more understandable when someone died in a car crash because they couldn't control a skid rather than Autopilot driving into a concrete barrier it avoided previously because something inscrutable in the programming changed. Perhaps we're heading towards a world with on average better, but less well-understood, outcomes.
  - mrtksn 7y ago
    I agree but we can still reason with the current systems in use. MCAS crashing planes is not that different from metal fatigue IMO. In both cases, we can look back and say "Okay, that's how it happened and we screwed up because we made a design mistake" which is very different from Autopilot driving into concrete barriers because that's a very high-level mistake. We wouldn't have a problem with the software not recognising barriers or mistake road lines correctly as long as this software doesn't claim to be able to handle high-level decisions and fail on something extremely obvious to humans leading to great damages.

bhouston 7y ago

Fully automated flight is the far future. The question is how near future is it? I think Boeing and Airbus have such long delays between project initiation and delivery that planning now to deliver a fully automated flight system in 10 years is likely in the realm of reasonable?

ilaksh 7y ago

I think more or better automation makes sense. However, in this case, they are just trying a new tactic to deflect blame. The fundamental problem was that they had new requirements and instead of allowing the engineers to create a new design, management wanted to save money so insisted the engineers shoehorn the new requirements into the old design with hacks resulting in a plane that was fundamentally unstable and ending with hundreds of people dying. The solution to that problem is to have several executives from Boeing and the FAA in prison. Then break Boeing down and rebuild it as an engineering organization. After that, yes, continue increasing the automation.