Anyway, for the sake of selling, they went into the biggest failure of modern aerospace engineering. This should just not have happened.
I am sure the company operating the Titanic didn't exactly strive to have a shipwreck either.
It is always engineer's responsibility to clearly explain the trade-offs to the managers. Only a manager who's making the decision with accurate information can be responsible for it.
So if they can’t hold that promise anyway, why not provide a better interface?
The MCAS system is an example of that. As you say that overriding design is typical in Boeing planes, but MCAS purposefully overrides it, that is, pushing the controls hard, which overrides other automatic functions, has no effect on MCAS.
This is something I think Boeing had got right with its manual overrides : when you design critical systems, you need human backup schemes, but you can go further and make these backup tightly integrated with the rest of the (highly automated) system.
That's pretty obvious, given by the fact that the system was initially not even documented nor was the scenario allegedly available for training in the brand spanking new 787-MAX simulator.
One of a close friend of mine who works at Airbus said that the company believes the next gen aircrafts would only require a single person in the cockpit, and everything will be handled through automations.
Airbus aircrafts are more automated than Boeing. If Boeing does not work on the automation part, it could loose to Airbus. Airbus faced AoA problem back in 2009, when Quantas flight suddenly dropped from the air. But they were able to patch it up within a month and no reported case has come up since then.
So I believe Boeing working on Automation is a good thing, and they should be able to fix it up.
Hasn't that myth been around for years, along with "Planes can take off and land by themselves?"
https://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths...
Of course there are parts of today’s aviation that are incompatible with automation. ATC over radio is one of them. Visual landing only at many airports is another one. There would be large costs to upgrading the infrastructures to be computer friendly, so I am not saying the switch is trivial, but it is bound to happen nevertheless.
And 2 pilots means 2 brains that can divide the workload...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
every nut and bolt can and will break. every component load increase battery size and generator load, carrying a greater risk for fires.
if you go down the path "automate with manual backup" then you introduce even more fault-prone systems: the circuitry that disable automation might be faulty and can be another fire risk all of itself and the conflict between faulty automation and manual overrides could be itself an aggravating issue in an emergency.
and even if your plane is perfect, you have to live in an imperfect environment (same argument as car autopilots really): other plane around you might have an emergency, forcing your to delay landing. the airport might have an emergency, forcing a detour, the ils could break down, even on final.
it's exceedingly hard to write software that handles the common cases well enough, imagine having to write software to handle also the unforeseeable faults.
> remote control
and this introduces a whole new topic: systems rarely used are the ones with the more reliability issues. both manual and remote override, on top of being more stuff with their own failure modes, would be rarely tested in practice until the moment they'd be needed the most.
Good luck finding paying customers to board such a plane.
When designing a critical system such as an aircraft, you must include human authority into it. No technology will ever be 100% foolproof. This is not a stance against technology, automation or innovation, it's a matter of concept : most of systems (and aircraft in particular) are human-machine systems.
You cannot design an unoverrideable automatic mechanism. Think of how you can appreciate the capacity of full control over your computer and your OS (happy OpenBSD user here, for the record).
This is where Boeing messed up big time. According to the article they only had 2 AoA sensor, completely missing the fact that what happens if one sensor fails and which is correct. Airbus has 3, but IMO a critical component like an AoA sensor there should be 5 + additional inputs from the artificial horizon should be considered.
>You cannot design an unoverrideable automatic mechanism.
Yes, it makes sense. Even a complete automatic mechanism would need functionality to override in case things go completely haywire.
No, you missed something really critical in all this. There are 2 AoA sensors, however only 1 of them is used as input for the MCAS system. There was no redundancy whatsoever!
The proposed software patch will use both AoA sensors, and light an indicator light if they disagree. They don't want to retrofit the planes with 3 sensors like Airbus, because obviously Boeing cares more about profits than safety and good engineering.
Those logics of "let's guess automatically if that sensor is failing" are just pushing the problem further. The real problem is too much reliance on automatic systems and top little human integration in the overall system (the human-machine system, that is to say).