I'd be pretty comfortable flying it after all this attention and review. It will probably be the best reviewed passenger plane software developed in America, if not the world once this is over.
Boeing deserves a 9-figure fine though, and its shareholders should lose massively to make sure this doesn't happen again.
I'm not convinced. The pressure on Boeing to fix this ASAP is immense. That is not a good environment for writing safety critical software. Especially if they are doing a "broader software redesign". I don't believe that software quality can be enforced from the outside.
Interesting tidbit in the video. At 1:43 you see a MAX in Jet Airways livery - an airline that ceased operations and terminated all flights about 1 month after the grounding began.
For anyone writing software controlling machines it is pretty much the status quo. It has to be darn near perfect, updating it later if it is even possible will be expensive and inconvenient
As much as it is a shitty environment if you have 6 months to fix it and all of the company resources you can think of to ask for that is lots of time.
> It will probably be the best reviewed passenger plane software developed in America, if not the world once this is over.
The problem is that this is not actually a software problem. It’s an airplane design problem, and Boeing is trying to convince you that it’s just the software.
Even if the software is perfect, this plane remains a flying coffin until it is redesigned from scratch.
It's a culture problem. You need to fix the culture to fix the root causes of all of this. And listening to the CEO (who is the culture) doesn't seem they want to fix it.
When doing root cause analysis there is a pyramid with people problems at the top, then deeper technical problems, process problems, culture problems and value problems.
Most root cause analysis stops with people problems, or technical problems while all the root cause analysis I've done never showed that problems end there. Culture and value have often been the underlying causes.
Yes, everyone focuses on the software here. They assume that MCAS just needs a few updates and it will be all good.
How can we trust that assessment? What if the plane is inherently unsafe? There's been no critical 3rd party review of the plane without MCAS in operation. Everything is a Boeing talking point. Their proposed fix is 2 AoA sensors (on top of whatever slapped-together software updates), and if they disagree, disable MCAS. That's going to decrease the MTBF of that system. So, IMO, the real question is, why should MCAS even be allowed if it's so easily disabled? Either the planes can fly without it or they can't.
I bet they will be able to test the known or anticipated issues. What about the unknowns that bad hardware design introduced? Thats why people are scared of.
Boeing deserves a 9-figure fine though, and its shareholders should lose massively to make sure this doesn't happen again.