

Boeing Knew of Problems With 787 Batteries Before Fires - cremnob
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/business/boeing-aware-of-battery-ills-before-the-fires.html?pagewanted=all

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bborud
I can't imagine that the aerospace business is that different from the
software industry or the automotive industry in that every product that gets
delivered has known defects of unknown severity. It would surprise me if the
planes didn't have at least a few hundred known issues -- a dozen of which may
prove to be more serious than first anticipated.

Engineering reality may not match romantic expectation. Even for something as
important as aeroplanes.

~~~
confluence
Well said. Engineering is a game of higher-dimensional whack-a-mole.

You can test, and push stuff to the edge all you want - but things will still
hit the fan in some corner case.

Failure is the only constant.

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snarfy
There will always be problems like this. Many man-years of engineering and
millions of parts went into creating it.

What troubles me is that they are sold without any burn-in, or if there is
burn-in, it's inadequate. There should be for example 50,000 miles on each
plane of test flight before it can be sold. I'm not sure what the number
should be, but it should be a lot more than they have now. Sure that's
expensive testing, but so are the planes, and it wouldn't be forever, only
until the design is vetted.

It seems like a problem of process more than anything.

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venomsnake
The new management moto - throw it to the market in whatever condition to try
to make quarterly profit, no matter if you put people in danger, trash your
partners image and hurt your company massively in the long run. Also only obey
the letter and not the spirit of the law and shove uncomfortable information
under the rug.

~~~
aerocontractor
The true driving force of the aeronautical industry (and probably other
sectors where you work on projects too big to risk personal accountability) is
greenlighting. The real motto is "do not ever bring bad news to your
management".

Even if 50% to 80% of people up a chain of command are honest, you only need
two or three managers putting their career before a responsible behavior to
have a top-level management with a completely distorted image of reality (and,
more often than not, perfectly fine with this).

Every day, I am reminded of Feynman conclusion in his report about the
Challenger crash: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

The only thing that prevents commercial airliners from being a complete mess
is that EASA has no incentive to go too easy on Boeing and FAA has no
incentive to go too easy on Airbus.

