Boeing deserves to get nailed for this. You can't tell me they didn't know it was the MCAS at fault after the first crash 6 months ago, and decided to do...nothing.
For example, most health insurance systems around the world have a value they place on one year of "quality" human life, and won't cover medical treatments that cost more than that amount per year. In 2008, that number was about $50k [1]. I don't know what it is now.
When considering whether the monetary costs of a regulation are worth it in the US the EPA used about $9 million as the worth of a life saved in 2010, and the FDA used about $8 million. The DoT used almost $10 million in 2016. Cites for those are in this Wikipedia article [2].
[1] http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1808049,0...
I fully agree (even expanded to all fields/areas/industries/activities - but let's try not to over-regulate everything, if possible :) ).
What do you believe are some examples of things that are over regulated?
Ok, this is a very good question.
Thinking about it, I cannot think of any area I know about that is regulated, as a baseline, too much for my taste.
BUT:
E.g. 2 years ago I thought that the logs of my app (whiĉh is SOX-relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act ) weren't nice, so after talking to the other team members I slightly changed them to e.g. align strings (using tabs instead of fixed chars) and posting more informative/detailed messages.
When the auditors performed their review they saw that the new logs did not match the old ones (aaargh - string mismatch!!!) therefore we had to go over each change, checking why-it-was-done-by-whom-based_on_which_request_and_did_it_get_the_approval_to_go_live_and_was_it_reviewed_and_signed_off_by_business_after_go_live etc..., so an infinite pain. This is what over-regulation means technically for me :)
This logic makes me really sad. You're complaining about overregulation when under-regulation just killed 300 people because you had to make a few changes in an app once. Please think about this more deeply than, "I know a few hundred people died, but lets not respond too harshly and have me spend a few more hours on my apps".
Please do that next time.
Thx :)
From the OP: "I CANT THINK OF ANYTHING"
"Haircuts seem overregulated"
"The drug approval process might move too slowly"
So on one side we have "planes not crashing", "electrical codes being followed", "air quality not as bad as in Shanghai".
On the other side we have "haircuts are over-regulated".
Hmm, not sure which side I'm on here...
That is exactly right and exactly why they need to be nailed for this.
No hindsight is required to know Boeing was focused on making sure the welfare of Boeing and it's shareholders was taken care of, with little or no regard to the welfare of the flying public.
Now that we see that training and procedural changes appear to be a less effective mitigant than expected, we can say that with a high degree of certainty that the risk of increased road deaths does not offset the risks of continuing to fly the aircraft.
Call me a skeptic but I have no doubt Boeing was well aware of the issue with the MCAS well before that first data point.
Even before that first crash, there have been reports in the media that claim many pilots had complained about the dangers of the MCAS.
I don't think this is true - the newspaper that first made this claim overstated their findings. Pilots, in general, did not know about MCAS before the Lion Air crash.
Consider this link:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-13/737-max-pilots-report...
From that link:
Airline pilots on at least two US flights have reported that an automated system seemed to cause their Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes to tilt down suddenly.
That reporting suggests problems were known well in advance of the first crash.
Such a consideration (while valid) is not Boeing's to make.
After the first crash, Boeing certainly knew that it had hooked up MCAS to a single AoA vane. I don't think they could sincerely argue that hooking up a single sensor to a primary control surface with no backup sensor is airworthy -- either practically or legally. There are regulations about it, and that's why Airbus has three AoA vanes and uses majority quorum. That's why I think the grounding should have happened earlier.
I guess that I agree at least partially with you (even without the 2nd incident, for which no official facts have been presented - but therefore I cannot upvote you as there is no confirmation yet, sorry), thinking about the facts that e.g. MCAS is not intuitive to understand/use for the pilots and that it relies on only 1 sensor (at least the original version) (any other flaw?).
About the consequences:
I just hope that the whole investigation won't boil down to just some "crazy" engineers that implemented that system because they were having a bad day or had no clue about what they were doing etc... .
Top-management must have known (at least implicitly/indirectly) the risks associated to a tight deadline and/or a miracle-like re-engineering of an old airplane and/or not having airplane-hackers available during the re-engineering phase and/or etc... because one of the roles of top management is to ask questions when something out of the ordinary happens especially when A LOT of money is involved.
Of course if top-mgmt puts enough pressure to achieve something, no questions will arise from both ends (and here we can probably optimistically go into the area of whistleblowers :) ).
I think that the same thing can be applied to Volkswagen (e.g. impossible that some engineer came up with "and here we have a Diesel engine outputting half as much noxious gas as everybody else on the planet" and nobody else asked questions because the mgmt wasn't pressuring those departments to get exactly such results) and other previous scandals.
I predict that there will be a split in the industry between "software engineer" and "software laborer" where there are specific certifications you need to have before being called an "engineer". "Software engineers" will be held responsible, like civil engineers are, for mistakes that result in accidents. Companies that write safety critical software like auto, air, and space industries where human lives or huge $$$ are on the line will hire engineers, e-commerce companies will continue to hire "code laborers".
Maybe they will even give you a fancy ring to wear?
The problem here was that the process got too expensive, so Boeing was pressured into skipping it.
Not all software has the same consequences for failure. The highest level is when failure is catastrophic, i.e. "Failure may cause deaths, usually with loss of the airplane." This requires the highest "Level A" assurance level.
Presumably MCAS was not originally evaluated as needing to meet the highest level. If it were, the single AoA input would have immediately disqualified the design right off the bat.
There's some speculation that the delays on the "fix" are because if they have to redevelop the software at a "Level A" standard that means basically a complete reimplementation with full tracability of requirements from design to source code through compilation to executable, with independent verification. That won't happen in a few weeks.
No, because most companies aren't developing life-critical software.
I would imagine most companies that are developing life-critical software are familiar with those requirements.
Hmmmm. Interesting. Is it legally required to use this standard for these critical softwares?
And are developers legally required to be licensed, in the same way that civil engineers are?
1) It mutates it a few degrees at a time in a non-terminating loop, so it effectively has control authority of the entire stabilizer.
2) Even DAL C would require using more than a single input!
I once bought a domain called "paleolithic-computing" (neolithic wasn't available, even though I used the stonehenge picture), to use as a blog.
We are indeed in the caveman stage. In fact, in some ways, we seem to have regressed. There is a pressure to release features faster and faster, and everyone knows you can achieve anything in a sprint, right? Then just get 'devops' to deploy.
It helps that most other (or proper) engineering disciplines have been around for far longer. We are not even comparable to egyptians building pyramids, we are still figuring out how to build huts (and rebuilding them every few years with new tech).
Give it time.
Not saying it's strictly that way, just different trade-offs.