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Comment by petee | Hacker News Reader

I don't get how some planes were affected, but not all; Every 787 in China should be running the same software version, let alone the world, no?

Are there any reasons a fleet plane might be using a different version? I'm coming up short on reasons, other than language, or maybe special hardware modifications?

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iPhones on China have interesting "hacks" to comply with laws (GPS has some restrictions: http://nowiknow.com/the-problem-with-chinese-gps/), and they're not allowed to have the Taiwan flag emoji.

I also noticed the other day that Google Maps shows static images for S. Korea (not the fancy WebGL stuff). Also due to laws.

How does this user-facing map change translate to avionics though?

Both are examples of laws messing with tech availability and inspiring custom workarounds. Those workarounds then tend to suffer from getting less attention than the mainline version with regards to updates and maintenance. Chinese aviation might be hit by both import restrictions (by the Chinese government) and export restrictions (by the American government) at the same time.

That's true, but that's also hardly a unique case - many other countries have special requirements and demand (e.g. Russia also uses metric system).

Also many other countries demand Google Maps manipulation (USA being one of them by demanding hiding of military bases, not to mention many other border disputes over the world). So I'm not sure how authors point really links up to the difference in avionics in Boeing JUST for China.

What are those different requirements?

China has different requirements than the rest of the world. It'd probably be good to have a pilot chime in here (one who flies both in China and ROW). For instance they allocate flight levels in metric units (most of the world still uses feet, IIRC).

They have regular software updates. Just like Windows update, nobody do that regularly

I concur. For example in telecom getting operators to update anything is just a pain. Unless they are seeing service affecting issues, they are totally fine running decade old software. Also sometimes if they have lets say version 5 and current is version 12, latest, and they need some fix, then depending on the size and wealth of the company they may force manufacturer to create version 5 plus fix, making it a new branch just for them, even if all versions 6 to 12 were already tested in production.

I can speak from the enterprise side of this.

Typically this is done because the work required to certify a new version (either internal or external certification) is prohibitively expensive.

For core, business critical systems, a lot of large, non-technology businesses simply don't have a mirrored QA setup with enough coverage / integration simulation to work up through.

So... faced with a heavy testing price to upgrade, risk due to incomplete testing environments, and known current version behavior... a lot of businesses punt and say "We want our version + only the fix for this issue we're experiencing."

It's annoying from the software vendor side (QAing old_version + patch_x2 + patch_q5), but it absolutely makes sense from the business side.

The summary reason is: because the customer doesn't have a flexible and testable infrastructure configuration. And that's not really something a software vendor can change.

Haha, that's surprising though, since these are important systems, if there is an update, doesn't it mean something really needs to fixed, i.e, gps rollover? Any bug left unpatched seems unacceptable

Maybe I have more faith in the 'system' than I should...

Sometimes, perversely, important systems are the _least_ likely to be updated. Operators require extensive testing before widespread application of the updates, which takes time.

We're talking about the same manufacturer that's responsible for the 737 MAX fiasco. I'm not sure how much trust I would want to place in their software.

You're putting trust in their software whether you upgrade it or not.

You forget that Boeing doesn't own these planes. These aren't Tesla's. We are currently in an era were it seems to be expected that the manufacturer automatically update their software without the end user intervention, ie Tesla, Windows, Apple, etc... Thats not how it was done in the past, particularly when the bandwidth didn't exist.

I don't see how this changes what I wrote.

Not necessarily.

Different components could be made different companies. While flight controls and handling fly-by-wire could have been Boeing, the FMS could be (e.g.) Honeywell, GE.

The FMS, AFCS ("autopilot"), and (primary) FCS are three distinct systems per ATA iSpec 2200:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Spec_100/iSpec_2200

Things can be more blurred with fly-by-wire, but can still be conceptually separate.

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