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Re:Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airl... by cm2187 on Thursday April 04, 2019 @07:27PM (#19578161)
It's actually very rational. No one can declare something complex like a plane or a version of Windows to be "safe" or "secure". Only the absence of incident for a long period of time is an indication that it is.
Re:Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airl... by munk-a on Thursday April 04, 2019 @07:37PM (#19578221)
You, as a non-expert, can absolutely take that stance - but when it comes to planes I am comfortable demanding that mechanical units can be provably safe and secure and that there is a reasonably exhaustive understanding of those unit interactions that assures safety at some point.

There has been the mention that the customization of planes in a certain way exposed this error - that's the bullshit part. Planes are complicated, the testing of them is complicated, allowing your marketing/sales team arbitrarily inject feature flags into your life or death machine to maximize profits is silly.

Make a thing and prove it is safe, if you wish to modify said thing, then prove the new version is just as safe - and don't allow corners to be cut with something as dangerous and expensive as a plane, these things aren't cheap and they don't need to rapidly iterate versions, they can move slowly and safely and be held to a standard of provable safety that I agree would be unreasonable for software like windows or instagram.

As an aside, I would offer more leeway to Cessna, given their focus on the individual consumer market and emphasis of customization, if someone ordered the plane equivalent of the small pizza with half sausage no cheese and no sauce[1], but not too much more leeway due to the danger these planes can have on others.

[1] http://www.thesneeze.com/art/loose_art/dom8.jpg

Re:Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg Addresses the Ethiopian Airl... by cm2187 on Thursday April 04, 2019 @11:43PM (#19579509)
I don't know. A lot of the problems that occured on planes were hard to predict even though they go through the rigorous process you mention. Battery fire on B787. Cargo door on DC10. Engine leaks on A380, etc. These are all quality/design issues that were not predicted.