Two new potentially fatal bugs found in 737 Max software

Our reliability engineers use "Hope is not a strategy" as one of their branding statements.

The 787 has to be rebooted every 51 days or it shows faulty data to pilots:

https://www-theregister-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.the...

I believe that your point stands in the context of a large-capacity commercial airliner, but it is worth considering that in some fighters, this is actually by design. For example, the F-16 is not passively stable--even when the pilot lets go of the stick, the control surfaces are still working to keep the flight moving properly. However, there's much lower benefit when, you know, you're not designing a plane to dogfight with other planes in a life-or-death struggle thousands of feet in the air. Even then, I believe that the control systems are based on voting, where many operations occur in triplicate between various processors and then a consensus is reached for the action.

But building a system like that is difficult, unnecessary for a craft like the 737 MAX, and crucially didn't come close to meeting the same level of redundancy, since I believe the crashes were traced back to single-point failures in the angle-of-attack sensor. Boeing tried to have it both ways, and ended up killing hundreds of people as a result.

Anyway, I thought it was worth pointing out that sometimes fixing aerodynamics problems with software is actually used in airplane design to good effect. The problem is that no one should have thought about or signed off on doing so in this situation.