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Comment by Hunisgung | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years ago, I was working on the verification team for a (non-critical) avionics system for a large commercial aircraft. I noticed one of the components seemed to have more failures than expected.

I reported the issue and the systems architect waved it off arguing that his analysis of the supplier data had proven that the MTBF for this component was over 500 thousand hours.

Few months later, a task force was established by the project management to look for an alternate supplier for this component after it became obvious that its failure rate was significantly higher than advertised.

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Much, perhaps most, of the effect we have as individuals in large organizations is indirect and hard to see or quantify. It's not always as simple as we think and changing course of a group almost always takes time, education, repetition, and some redundant effort. It's still worthwhile and effective.

It is entirely possible that this is a success story of a lower-level engineer raising an issue that the higher levels then addressed.

Just because no one immediately jumps and say "by golly, we have to get rid of component X right now!" doesn't mean that the issue didn't begin percolating vertically and horizontally, ultimately resulting in a large-scale corrective effort.

in my experience this is by far the less likely scenario, but I would like to hear from OP whether his initial work contributed to the ultimate decision

For more context, I was 99% sure they there was an issue with the component and that a hardware rework would have to be made sooner or later. The systems architect had some seniority over me but I could have pushed the issue hard enough for it to be addressed.

Then I did not take the high road. The guy was very obnoxious and I had other issues to address. So I let it slide to maintain my "this is important" quota for other matters.

And a couple of months later, when some units failed on the test aircrafts (I insist on the fact that this was not a critical system), I had an issue report showing that the issue was observed during supplier-side tests and then ignored.

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