Re:How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Devel...
by Jtsummers on Friday August 21, 2020 @10:32AM
(#24235186)
The context for that would be useful if you want to use it as a way to judge a company. I was involved, in just the last few years, in distributing updates via tape. Why? Because the target system that needed updating used tape drives to receive the updates, because they were built in the 1980s or 1990s (but designed in the 1970s or 1980s). You may think it's crazy to keep using that mechanism, but replacing old hardware is a non-trivial challenge in the aviation world.
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Re:How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Devel...
by edgriebel on Friday August 21, 2020 @01:23PM
(#24236922)
Right! It costs millions to certify something for flight even if it's been in commercial use for years. Even for something as simple as swapping a spinning disk for an SSD.
And it has to be verified in-situ with the other components of the system. And separate testing and documentation is required for each airframe variant ("Type certificate"), so a swap for a 747 and 737 even though they're both Boeing products requires separate testing and documentation. There could be THOUSANDS of pages of documentation for a non-trivial product.