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Comment by bradhe | Hacker News Reader

> competent technical leader to course-correct the culture and product issues that have crept in at Boeing.

This issue looks to be a pretty run-of-the-mill bug in their software. It's likewise scoped down pretty far--there only exist a few runways (in US, Colombia, and Guayana) that make this relevant. ADs like this come out all the time.

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Not blaming this commenter specifically, but this pervasive callous attitude of over-focusing on narrow metrics of importance seems to be why our general experience with software is so... shitty.

The problem with such “partial” functionality is that it breaks composition. When you start building systems with a dozen modules, each with a couple of edge cases like this, the probability of something failing becomes high, and makes the final result/experience very crappy. Imagine if you had a sweater you couldn’t wear on Tuesdays!

For those who don’t get it, it’s not just about how often this “bug” affects the system (let alone the fact that it is quite severe). It indicates an utter lack of competence towards developing safety critical systems... like, how can one be writing navigation code and NOT know this?

That this could be considered a run-of-the-mill software bug means that we have set our standards too low.

I get the gist of what you are saying about it being par for the course, but can you explain why a heading of 270 (West if 0 is North)would affect air worthiness? Is it something to due with true North vs. magnetic north deviations? Grasping here. I am truly curious about this one. Thanks!

Air worthiness is determined by the FAA. In this case, the aircraft are only considered not airworthy when the flight plan calls for landing on one of those runways. Operating them in any other configuration is A-OK.

As to why the bug exists, who knows :)

Edit: Clarified slightly.

It affects airworthiness because the displays went blank when certain ILS approaches with heading 270 were selected. This is unexpected and would require the flight crew to fall back on other instruments.

The FAA routinely issues airworthiness directives for all sorts of safety issues. Here are a few others published in the past week or so:

https://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgad.nsf...

Based on the AD, I suspect they're doing some sort of math on the longitude coordinates of the runway borders/endpoints. ("[O]nly seven runways worldwide, as identified in this AD, have latitude and longitude values that cause the blanking behavior.")

Why does correctness matter, its not like anyone is ACTUALLY named "DROP TABLE users;"

Background for the post above: https://xkcd.com/327/

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