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Re:Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX Investigation Preliminary Report by Arnt on Thursday April 04, 2019 @03:58PM (#19576473)
I've read a couple of these things (strongly recommended — aviation postmortems are a model for us all) and my impression is that "too large" or "slap" are foreign terms in their debugging culture.

Their priority list is, AFAICT: 1. Find out what happened. 2. Find out why. 3. Find out how to make sure it doesn't happen again. 4. See point 3. 5. See point 3.

Re:Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX Investigation Preliminary Report by AnimalMuppet on Thursday April 04, 2019 @05:50PM (#19577454)
If "why" turns out to be "runaway corporate greed", what do you do for steps 3, 4, and 5?

Not that I think that's going to be the result of step 2. It was a contributing factor, probably, but it's not the whole story by any means.

Re:Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX Investigation Preliminary Report by Arnt on Friday April 05, 2019 @03:03AM (#19580380)
I don't think you would say that if you had read such a report.

The ones I have read do not feature three-word explanations, but rather say things like "the chain of events that led to the accident could have been stopped at any of these single points: <seven items> and would also have been stopped if both a&b had been done, or if both c&d, or both c&e" and then discuss how each of the many might be changed. They don't say "five of the links in the event chain were at a profit-hungry corporation, whose CEO should be thrown in gaol, then they'll know to do that differently in the future".

"Runaway corporate greed" is fine reason for a quick and angry post on a social network, but aviation postmortems are a different kind of beast, heavy on analysis and prevention, light on anger.

Re:Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX Investigation Preliminary Report by chopin on Friday April 05, 2019 @03:34AM (#19580515)
As the Seattle Times reported, the MCAS system was mis-characterized by Boeing. Rules don't help if you don't go by them.

This postmortem must include "runaway corporate greed" absolutely. Not sure what can be done about it as the FAA is not trustworthy anymore.

Re:Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX Investigation Preliminary Report by nutjob2 on Thursday April 04, 2019 @07:43PM (#19578253)
What happened is that they hacked on an inappropriate engine onto an old airframe, then they hacked a hidden automation to fix the prior hack.

The engineering fix is obvious, but management is the problem.