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Comment by twbarr | Hacker News Reader

There's a middle ground between "hardware store crap" and "custom." The aviation industry has plenty of standard interior lighting and environmental control system that's known not to light people on fire or short out or otherwise fail and kill somebody.

https://www.collinsaerospace.com/what-we-do/industries/busin...

These are still COTS products.

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Absolutely. Former avionics company employee here - not only do companies like Collins have COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) products to buy, but they themselves are frequently made of at least some COTS components. So each of those components have been tested and put into production by a company who's laser focused on the safety and reliability of that part.

You only need to spend a little time with a reliability engineer and see some of the calculations they do to start realizing how when even one or two components in a system have little corners cut, how it can drastically impact the overall safety of the system.

With the amount of corners cut on this submarine, I am unfortunately less than surprised at both the failure in the article and the crisis happening to it right now.

I hope all the souls aboard can somehow get home safe, and I hope the people who put them into this seemingly corners-cut vessel do not get to float any more craft, and that they didn't undersell the riskiness of this venture... although I'm unfortunately not optimistic about any of that.

If you were to believed the movies, the Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS Flight Stick is the most common input method on any flying vehicle. :)

It is a good stick tho

It is indeed :) I upgraded mine to the VKB Gunfighter Ultimate, as it allows for much less stress on your arm and fingers, but kept the Throttle.

Apollo 1 has been too long ago. Collective memory fades. Each generation seems to need its own disasters to keep its safety standards up.

The general public does, for those in the respective fields those safety lessons are ingrained in proper procedures and constititional knowledge. That's why start-ups in those fields are risky, usually their founders have never witnessed said procedures and knowledge at work, never worked under those procedures. Employees, especially early on, tend to be young an inexperienced as well. As a result, those companies neither have the constitiational knowledge nor the processes of their more mature counter part. Some try up make for this with "hacker" culture...

Those things are valid for everything from med tech to aerospace and, yes, cars. The dangerous thing so, and I saw that in real life, is when that culture spreads. Usually through juniors who gained their first experience in said start-ups, and not one of those legacy shops.

Edit: None of what I wrote prevents legacy giants from cutting corners themselves, the B737 MAX showed us as much.

Institutional Knowledge needs to preserved and maintained once developed.

I imagine we'll see some of the large-cap tech companies dealing with this very soon.

> The aviation industry has plenty of standard interior lighting and environmental control system that's known not to light people on fire or short out or otherwise fail and kill somebody.

I am pretty sure the camper's equipment industry too. I haven't seen many occurence of campers burning out and in most case it was caused by people smoking in their camper or forgetting to turn off gas stove.

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