News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard. Parent comment

Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by mikekchar on Monday May 06, 2019 @03:39AM (#19837516)
There is usually no such thing as "safe" or "not safe". It's more like "X% chance to happen". X might be really, really small, but not zero. Usually you can make X arbitrarily small, but the amount of money needed grows non-linearly. Do you pay 10x the price of an aircraft to reduce the chances a problem so that it goes from happening once every 100 years to once every 1000 years?

Who should make the decision whether an airplane is "safe enough"? Should it be the buyer who wants the safest plane? If you did that then rich airlines could keep out new competition by specifying safety features that make airplanes more expensive than they need to be. Should it be the country where the airline is based? But different airlines are based in different countries. Should there be options so that one country can specify higher standards than others?

Basically, that's how you get where we are I think. I'm not sure how you avoid that.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by onion2k on Monday May 06, 2019 @04:41AM (#19837763)
Who should make the decision whether an airplane is "safe enough"?

How about these guys? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Aviation_Safety_...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by jrochkind1 on Monday May 06, 2019 @01:17PM (#19841574)
it's worth pointing out, however, that it was a software-only feature that they turned on or off depending on whether the customer had paid. If I understand right?

I think that changes the calculus of "Do you pay 10x the price of an aircraft to reduce the chances a problem so that it goes from happening once every 100 years to once every 1000 years"

They had already invested the money to develop the feature. Delivering a plane with or without it to a customer had the same cost. If the customer paid more, they got the safety feature turned on, the end.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Boeing Believed a 737 Max Warning Light Was Standard by grkvlt on Thursday May 09, 2019 @11:03PM (#19874700)
> Delivering a plane with or without it to a customer had the same cost

Not exactly, surely. The ongoing/recurring costs to Boeing would be increased with the feature enabled - it's another thing that can go wrong and must be monitored, it changes support requirements and the overall software runtime complexity. I assume that would get factored in, somehow...

[ Parent | on HN ]