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The sad/pathetic part of this is that Boeing are infinitely more qualified to make these assessments. The scary/pathetic part is that when faced with such a pr

The sad/pathetic part of this is that Boeing are infinitely more qualified to make these assessments. The scary/pathetic part is that when faced with such a problem, the FAA's choices were: 1. Punt the responsibility to Boeing and hope it works out. Or 2. Just tell them "no" as we've been telling everyone else who wants to use whatever post-60's technology they've chosen for their aircraft.

ims 14y ago
I don't necessarily disagree about those things being sad/scary/pathetic. But these things cost money. Taxpayers are generally averse to spending money on long term prevention. Something that people consider an "expensive boondoggle" and refuse to pay for before an incident tends to become "shame on you for not doing your job" right after. Do you remember after the BP spill how people were shocked -- shocked! -- that the government did not have deep sea oil rig submersibles and that we had to rely on BP's resources? This type of thinking blew my mind. Who on earth would have supported paying for deep sea utility submersibles for some "black swan" oil spill before this incident happened? And the funny part is, now that it's over and everybody has moved on, they probably still wouldn't. So back to the FAA... how are we going to pay for top tier engineering talent in the kinds of numbers required to check these components at the level of detail we might wish? TL;DR: proper oversight costs money.
patmcguire 14y ago
This is a growing problem in a lot of industries, sort of similar to what Joel Spolsky calls the "Lord Palmerston" principle http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html Everything's so big, but you can't learn any faster than people before you, when everything was smaller, so you focus on a tiny area. In the 60's an amateur mechanic could understand and tweak a car, now they're so complex a profession mechanical engineer would have a hard time. How many people could have actually understand the issue with the 787 or with mortgage CDO's before anything went wrong? Only a handful, and they're generally the ones making the things.
neurotech1 14y ago
Checking if something has a 1 in 10m probability of failure, is the wrong idea. The question should be 'What if it does?' and that wasn't adequately answered here. There didn't seem to be any thermal isolation between cells, and a questionably risky type of Lithium-Ion chemistry.

ims 14y ago

I don't necessarily disagree about those things being sad/scary/pathetic. But these things cost money. Taxpayers are generally averse to spending money on long term prevention. Something that people consider an "expensive boondoggle" and refuse to pay for before an incident tends to become "shame on you for not doing your job" right after. Do you remember after the BP spill how people were shocked -- shocked! -- that the government did not have deep sea oil rig submersibles and that we had to rely on BP's resources? This type of thinking blew my mind. Who on earth would have supported paying for deep sea utility submersibles for some "black swan" oil spill before this incident happened? And the funny part is, now that it's over and everybody has moved on, they probably still wouldn't. So back to the FAA... how are we going to pay for top tier engineering talent in the kinds of numbers required to check these components at the level of detail we might wish? TL;DR: proper oversight costs money.

patmcguire 14y ago

This is a growing problem in a lot of industries, sort of similar to what Joel Spolsky calls the "Lord Palmerston" principle http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmerston.html Everything's so big, but you can't learn any faster than people before you, when everything was smaller, so you focus on a tiny area. In the 60's an amateur mechanic could understand and tweak a car, now they're so complex a profession mechanical engineer would have a hard time. How many people could have actually understand the issue with the 787 or with mortgage CDO's before anything went wrong? Only a handful, and they're generally the ones making the things.

neurotech1 14y ago

Checking if something has a 1 in 10m probability of failure, is the wrong idea. The question should be 'What if it does?' and that wasn't adequately answered here. There didn't seem to be any thermal isolation between cells, and a questionably risky type of Lithium-Ion chemistry.