Re:737 Max Explanation by a Software Engineer
by chopin on Monday March 18, 2019 @05:44AM
(#19419747)
You take input from both sensors only when they don't disagree (by a margin). There may be failure modes where both have the same bad input but I don't think that this doubles your chances of processing bad input.
Re:737 Max Explanation by a Software Engineer
by wahern on Monday March 18, 2019 @01:24PM
(#19423048)
You have double the chance that one of the sensors is bad. Which one do you choose? The one that says AoA is normal? Maybe that's the one that is bad. Worse, maybe such a bad input is more likely in a stall scenario.
Without any ability to differentiate bad from good input, you may be better off simply relying on a single sensor at any one time and completely ignoring the other, at least as far as controlling MCAS is concerned. Tossing up a warning that says the sensors disagree is another matter.
Re:737 Max Explanation by a Software Engineer
by chopin on Wednesday March 20, 2019 @08:28AM
(#19441359)
I meant disabling the system if they disagree.
I agree that one can argue that this doubles the chance of system shutdown compared to properly detecting that one sensor fails. That's obviously only ok if the system is expendable to a certain degree.
You could choose to select the input that results in the least-worst bad outcome. But that may not bring the total risk below the increased risk of utilizing both sensors. The sensors are doing something purposeful, after all.
So it may be logical what they're doing. OTOH, the logic may make sense only in a path dependent sort of way, after a series of bad decisions that put them in a corner with poor options. There probably really should be 3 or more sensors.