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That seems like a process that could have eaisly been reverted to a paper based worksheet of some type. from my understanding thats how they did it before the s

That seems like a process that could have eaisly been reverted to a paper based worksheet of some type. from my understanding thats how they did it before the software.

bpicolo 2y ago
Doesn't seem easy at all if you've trained people, and they have practiced, on software and not on paper. Mistakes can be fatal.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ericcumbee 2y ago
  those are called contingencies....you train people for those.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Training people for something they basically never have to do, and keeping that training current, is more expensive than you might imagine.
  - SteveNuts 2y ago
    The contingency in this case is just to shut down apparently. They’ve probably figured out that training on this issue is more expensive than shutting down for a few hours. Or maybe their risk management teams have never thought of this happening, who knows.
lxgr 2y ago
Generally? Definitely. On short notice and without pilots having any experience in doing it? That’s another hole in the Swiss cheese. You either do something manually all the time, or you automate it and declare it a critical system. Half measures of automation kill people in Aviation.
potato3732842 2y ago
You can't simply roll back because the old ways required the use of phone lines and fax systems and record types and workflows that literally no longer exist. That said, the critical plane flying and ground handling stuff (like loading cargo for proper balance) is well practiced and understood enough to run fine with ad-hoc paper records albeit it would reduce operational tempo. It's putting the right luggage in the right place, making sure the right plane gets its poo pumped, making sure the cleaning crew knows what to do and where to go, recording maintenance needs and activities on anything that doesn't fly, etc, etc that doesn't have redundancy or good fallback plans or people/managers who understand how their jobs fit into the context well enough to improvise effectively and even if they could the B rate people you had design all your corporate process didn't account for that sort of stuff so people would be risking their jobs if they couldn't do sign offs on the company ipads and whatnot.
Etheryte 2y ago
Weight and balance isn't simply a matter of add up the weight of all cargo on paper. You need to load the plane in a reasonably laid out way and the whole result dictates how you take off. Being wrong or winging it could easily mean a catastrophic failure when trying to take off.
- potato3732842 2y ago
  Weight and balance calculations are something that anyone in aviation will wind up memorizing early in their career. You don't "need" bespoke software for it. You don't need software at all. It just makes it way easier when you have hundreds of individual items. What's most likely to happen is that they will punch it all into an excel sheet and get their primary objective of weight distribution correct. What will suffer is cargo organization so the crew at the layover is likely to find that they need to unload a bunch of stuff in order to get at some cargo that needs to come off at that stop. A plane "could" fall out of the sky but that would require multiple people not doing their job but there's no point in pearl clutching over that because even if the software works the same people not doing their job can still cause that outcome.
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    This vastly understates the seriousness of problems you can run into. It was just last year that all of Alaska Airlines was grounded [0] because of issues with weight and balance. While those takeoffs resulted in tail scrapes, they could've just as easily lead to running out of runway if the bug had been slightly different [1]. [0] https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/aviation/2023/02/20/after-alaska-airlines-planes-bump-runway-a-scramble-to-pull-the-plug/ https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/aviation/2023/02/20/after-al... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34898361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34898361
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      Comments like yours really drive me up the wall. Nobody doubts that a plane needs to be at least somewhat balanced to fly. It also needs fuel. It needs some semblance of a maintenance schedule. It needs many things. Everyone with a brain knows all this. So then what means beyond in-group signaling is served by hand wringing over any one of the dozens of critical links in the chain? The bug you cite, which you would not likely even know about if not for other commenters, was only caught because people asked for an old school manual calculation. Had the software process been more transparent it perhaps could have been caught earlier. The fact that someone failed to properly implement the calculation in software does not change the efficacy of doing the calculation manually. Furthermore, the fact that there were people capable of eyeballing the accuracy of the software outputs seems to back up my point that there are tons of people capable of doing these calculations kicking around.
c22 2y ago
Around 25 years ago I worked the PoS at a retail establishment. We ran all credit card payments using a machine that would dial-up our payment processor for each transaction. It used the same line as the fax, so if we were receiving or sending a many-page fax this operation would fail. Sometimes it failed for other reasons. As a backup we had the old carbon slips that went into a plastic rig and made an impression of the customer's card. We also had a printed out sales tax table and some more carbon slips we could use to hand-write a receipt. I had to resort to the paper based system on many occasions. A few years back I was in a store shopping when the power went out. The staff didn't know what to do and closed the store early. They had no way to sell me the items in my basket. I asked if they could take an impression of my card and got met with blank stares. They couldn't even take cash because they didn't know how to calculate the total amount, had nothing to write a receipt on, and their cash drawers wouldn't open anyway. Nowadays credit cards don't even come with raised numbers...
- guerrilla 2y ago
  > Nowadays credit cards don't even come with raised numbers... So that's what the raised numbers were for. I just got my first card without raised numbers last January. It still feels fake and "insecure" to me, even though I know better. Funny how things work.
  - diggan 2y ago
    My latest card doesn't even have the card number, expiry or CVC printed on it at all. And besides that, the CVC code is dynamically generated every time I need it, it doesn't even have a static CVC. Seems relatively new, as some people look at funnily when I hand it over when they need it for "deposits" or whatever.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Apple Card, by any chance? I've always wondered how that works for businesses that still prefer to compare the last four digits of a physical card with those of a booking made online, like some hotels or airlines still do.

That seems like a process that could have eaisly been reverted to a paper based worksheet of some type. from my understanding thats how they did it before the software.

bpicolo 2y ago

Doesn't seem easy at all if you've trained people, and they have practiced, on software and not on paper. Mistakes can be fatal.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ericcumbee 2y ago
those are called contingencies....you train people for those.
- lxgr 2y ago
  Training people for something they basically never have to do, and keeping that training current, is more expensive than you might imagine.
- SteveNuts 2y ago
  The contingency in this case is just to shut down apparently. They’ve probably figured out that training on this issue is more expensive than shutting down for a few hours. Or maybe their risk management teams have never thought of this happening, who knows.

lxgr 2y ago

Generally? Definitely. On short notice and without pilots having any experience in doing it? That’s another hole in the Swiss cheese. You either do something manually all the time, or you automate it and declare it a critical system. Half measures of automation kill people in Aviation.

potato3732842 2y ago

You can't simply roll back because the old ways required the use of phone lines and fax systems and record types and workflows that literally no longer exist. That said, the critical plane flying and ground handling stuff (like loading cargo for proper balance) is well practiced and understood enough to run fine with ad-hoc paper records albeit it would reduce operational tempo. It's putting the right luggage in the right place, making sure the right plane gets its poo pumped, making sure the cleaning crew knows what to do and where to go, recording maintenance needs and activities on anything that doesn't fly, etc, etc that doesn't have redundancy or good fallback plans or people/managers who understand how their jobs fit into the context well enough to improvise effectively and even if they could the B rate people you had design all your corporate process didn't account for that sort of stuff so people would be risking their jobs if they couldn't do sign offs on the company ipads and whatnot.

Etheryte 2y ago

Weight and balance isn't simply a matter of add up the weight of all cargo on paper. You need to load the plane in a reasonably laid out way and the whole result dictates how you take off. Being wrong or winging it could easily mean a catastrophic failure when trying to take off.

potato3732842 2y ago
Weight and balance calculations are something that anyone in aviation will wind up memorizing early in their career. You don't "need" bespoke software for it. You don't need software at all. It just makes it way easier when you have hundreds of individual items. What's most likely to happen is that they will punch it all into an excel sheet and get their primary objective of weight distribution correct. What will suffer is cargo organization so the crew at the layover is likely to find that they need to unload a bunch of stuff in order to get at some cargo that needs to come off at that stop. A plane "could" fall out of the sky but that would require multiple people not doing their job but there's no point in pearl clutching over that because even if the software works the same people not doing their job can still cause that outcome.
- Etheryte 2y ago
  This vastly understates the seriousness of problems you can run into. It was just last year that all of Alaska Airlines was grounded [0] because of issues with weight and balance. While those takeoffs resulted in tail scrapes, they could've just as easily lead to running out of runway if the bug had been slightly different [1]. [0] https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/aviation/2023/02/20/after-alaska-airlines-planes-bump-runway-a-scramble-to-pull-the-plug/ https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/aviation/2023/02/20/after-al... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34898361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34898361
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    Comments like yours really drive me up the wall. Nobody doubts that a plane needs to be at least somewhat balanced to fly. It also needs fuel. It needs some semblance of a maintenance schedule. It needs many things. Everyone with a brain knows all this. So then what means beyond in-group signaling is served by hand wringing over any one of the dozens of critical links in the chain? The bug you cite, which you would not likely even know about if not for other commenters, was only caught because people asked for an old school manual calculation. Had the software process been more transparent it perhaps could have been caught earlier. The fact that someone failed to properly implement the calculation in software does not change the efficacy of doing the calculation manually. Furthermore, the fact that there were people capable of eyeballing the accuracy of the software outputs seems to back up my point that there are tons of people capable of doing these calculations kicking around.

c22 2y ago

Around 25 years ago I worked the PoS at a retail establishment. We ran all credit card payments using a machine that would dial-up our payment processor for each transaction. It used the same line as the fax, so if we were receiving or sending a many-page fax this operation would fail. Sometimes it failed for other reasons. As a backup we had the old carbon slips that went into a plastic rig and made an impression of the customer's card. We also had a printed out sales tax table and some more carbon slips we could use to hand-write a receipt. I had to resort to the paper based system on many occasions. A few years back I was in a store shopping when the power went out. The staff didn't know what to do and closed the store early. They had no way to sell me the items in my basket. I asked if they could take an impression of my card and got met with blank stares. They couldn't even take cash because they didn't know how to calculate the total amount, had nothing to write a receipt on, and their cash drawers wouldn't open anyway. Nowadays credit cards don't even come with raised numbers...

guerrilla 2y ago
> Nowadays credit cards don't even come with raised numbers... So that's what the raised numbers were for. I just got my first card without raised numbers last January. It still feels fake and "insecure" to me, even though I know better. Funny how things work.
- diggan 2y ago
  My latest card doesn't even have the card number, expiry or CVC printed on it at all. And besides that, the CVC code is dynamically generated every time I need it, it doesn't even have a static CVC. Seems relatively new, as some people look at funnily when I hand it over when they need it for "deposits" or whatever.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Apple Card, by any chance? I've always wondered how that works for businesses that still prefer to compare the last four digits of a physical card with those of a booking made online, like some hotels or airlines still do.