
Are There Problems with the Boeing 737Max? 2nd Deadly Crash Raises New Questions - mykowebhn
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/africa/boeing-737-max-8-crash.html
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pella
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19353059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19353059)

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rurban
Relevant anti-stall SW problem on initial ascent, which they explain as
documentation problem:

"In that case, investigations by the Indonesian and American aviation
authorities determined that the Lion Air plane’s abrupt nose dive might have
been caused by updated Boeing software that was meant to prevent a stall but
that can send the plane into a fatal descent if the altitude and angle
information being fed into the computer system is incorrect.

The change in the flight control system, which can override manual motions in
the Max model, was not explained to pilots, according to some pilots’ unions."

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mach5
0.6% of 737 MAX aircraft delivered have been lost in unsurvivable accidents...
similar numbers to orbital rockets. yikes.

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gus_massa
It's an unfair calculation. Most orbital rocket are used only once.

Another unfair calculation: 40% of the Space Shuttle have been lost in
unsurvivable accidents.

It's better to compare the number of accident divided by the number of flight.
For the Space Shuttle, it's 2/135 = 1.4% of the flights. For the manned Soyuz,
it's 2/165 = 1.2% of the flight (but both are in very old models).

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pdx_flyer
I know reporters will say they don't want to us to draw conclusions but
honestly, I'll be avoiding the 737Max until this is figured out.

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SirLuxuryYacht
A very big tech company releases software updates that contain bugs for their
devices with fruit on them. One would think that they could produce software
without major problems, but it happens. One would also think that a very big
aerospace company could produce products without significant bugs, but it
seems that it unfortunately happens too. Talk about a fatal error.

Thinking about a solution to make their QC more robust brings me back to an
article from 11 days ago on fuzzing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265377](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19265377)

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foobarbazetc
I think Airbus does a lot of formal proving / verification of their flight
software. There was a great article about it which I can’t find anymore, but
Google is full of academic papers on it.

