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Comment When Boeing was good (Score 2) 78

A single point of failure would have been unthinkable.

The black box I worked on was only important enough to turn on a yellow light if it failed, and it ran the same algorithms in parallel on two processors with inputs inverted and logic DeMorganized, and it had a backup, and IIRC it could listen to more than one bus for air data.

Comment Layers of wrong, like an onion (Score 1) 148

I talked to one aerospace engineer who said his company immediately destroyed defective parts so there would be no risk of accidentally installing them.
On top of that, in any healthy organization it would be unthinkable to install them deliberately.
On top of that, when someone reported the situation, it should have been corrected immediately.
On top of that, it is pathological to retaliate against someone for doing his job.
It is hard to imagine fixing a corporate culture so utterly rotten.

Comment Re:Gaol 'em (Score 1) 114

There is room for a clear distinction between accidents on the one hand and deleting records for a coverup on the other.

There is also room to tell the difference between good faith screwups and deliberate neglect. Like when you retaliate against a QA person for reporting problems. https://www.seattletimes.com/b...

One of the reasons aviation was so safe for so long was indeed that people could own up to mistakes without going to prison. What Boeing has been up to appears to be well beyond mistakes.

Comment Good catch on incentives (Score 1) 199

As a follow-up, I prefer sources that I pay for. They still have an incentive to keep me, but less so to do it second by second with hits of adrenaline. Look long enough and it's possible to find scrupulous truth tellers in many political positions.
Sigh. Craigslist is good, but when newspapers could pay reporters from advertising, that stabilized things.

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