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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

I was just reading about the Air France flight that was lost over the Atlantic due to pilot panic, and a near-collision caused by confused pilots almost landing on a crowded taxiway, and a near-crash caused by pilot miscommunication about a flap setting just after takeoff that happened even more recently...

In light of this, I'm practically relieved to read about incidents caused by software bugs where the pilots were able to handle it calmly and with ease.

I don't know if that's a bad thing or a good thing.

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I suppose for every situation where a pilot gets confused or panics that results in a serious incident there are dozens(hundreds?) situations that never progressed far enough, because a pilot calmly prevented it.

Personally I consider autopilots etc, boredom relieving devices not an improvement or even replacement for pilots in future. I feel much safer in a plane a human lands by hand than if a computer program could do it.

Also, the whole "software controlled fly by wire" still makes me uneasy. I feel much better when I know there are actual physical cables that let the pilot move control surfaces. In a huge plane I can understand the necessity of using a hydraulic system which can be made to be extremely reliable, but software?

Perhaps it's because I got to see how software is usually developed?

When a bridge or a building is built you get an architect (depending on country also the civil engineer) sign under his/hers responsibility this thing is not going to collapse and kill people. If it does and negligence is proven that person goes to jail for a long time. There is no equivalent in software.

When responsibility is distributed over countless people you often get unreliable products. Why is it we don't build buildings like this? Probably, because people died in shoddy built buildings, also everyone can see cracks in the walls etc. If a software runs badly it's not so obvious.

Sadly, I think more people will die before this 70+ year discipline will come even close to implementing the safety processes devised by millenia of expertise in fields like civil engineering. So what can a person do to lower the probability of getting hurt? Probably not much. If you have to fly, you usually don't get a choice of a plane (and even if you do it's usually an Airbus vs Boeing). But in other areas of life one has much more control. For example, I'll not drive a car that has a computer I can't disable that can slam the brakes any moment at highway speeds if it detects "something" in front.

> Sadly, I think more people will die before this 70+ year discipline will come even close to implementing the safety processes devised by millenia of expertise in fields like civil engineering.

With all due respect, the safety culture and processes in aviation are excellent and exemplary.

Software in aviation is a bit more problematic (viz, MCAS in the MAX; though note that in the instances discussed here nobody came to harm, thanks to redundancy and pilots doing their job), but also subject to processes and rules that far exceed one or two people putting a signature to paper.

Yeah sometimes it’s easy to critique the air industry. But imagine if these same safety reviews were applied to the car industry. So many lives could be saved but we have become numb to car accidents.

Well, these problems do publicly rear their ugly head in cars intermittently. Telsa pushes out recall-worthy software updates, Toyota had its infamous stuck accelerator pedal issue in 2009, etc.

The airline industry gets such a weird amount of public attention across the board ranging from passenger safety to massive investigations if a plane goes down. It's not necessarily a bad thing but you certainly do not hear federal regulation stopping people from driving a model of car (recalls yes, but nothing akin to grounding) if there's one unexplained crash.

Toyota had its infamous stuck accelerator pedal issue in 2009, etc.

AFAIK that was never proven to be a software problem.

Strictly true but settling for $1.2B certainly certainly points to there being a problem.

Almost all (in the mathematical sense) car accidents are caused by pilot error, and not the subtle kind: driving into oncoming traffic. running red lights and other ways of ignoring way of right. drugs. speeding and tailgating.

You could envisage technical solutions for some classes of these errors, but they would usually require huge changes to infrastructure or only work for new cars. And full self-driving is still ways off.

I watch and listen to a lot of Strong Towns and NotJustBikes - a lot of the infrastructure change solutions already exist in European cities.

I view the overwhelming majority of driver errors as faulty system design. Instead of red lights use turnabouts like in Europe.

I just came from a small town in France where they put these staggered obstacles on one side of the road which forced both directions of traffic to be merged into one lane. So they forced people to drive into incoming traffic thereby causing cars to drive slower. A really low cost solution to slowing car speeds in the busy pedestrian area and making the roads safer for pedestrians.

In aviation, these kinds of things are solved with training and process. There is a reason pilots need a certain number of hours and multiple/recurrent checkrides to be able to fly people around for hire.

Most people think they are good drivers which makes them immune to actually getting better through training. As for process, good luck implementing it if you can’t train it.

I think the problem you mention has to do with the fact that software does not apply to one specific domain. It is easy to formulate a framework of engineering rigor for specific domains but this is not easily generalisable to all domains that software is applied to. But thankfully this is where regulators play an important role. Building codes have an explicit statement of how they want a building to work and fail, if you want to build engineering rigor in your team that does civil engineering software, that would be your starting point. For aviation the air authorities do the same. Afaic the us had outsourced that part of regulation to related enterprises for a while and this came up in the 737max aftermath. This is one of the few cases where the US seriously lags behind the rest of the world in my opinion.

I encourage you to research whether flying has gotten safer or more dangerous since 1970, and then consider why that is.

Downside of this is when you get a panicked pilot and a software bug, which is actually sort of inevitable since the one rides on top of the other.

Having worked both in aviation incident investigation and for Big Mama B at various times, every time I see a Boeing story my whole body involuntarily clenches for a moment.

In . . delight! Of course! Delightful clenching.

Full-body kegels

Arguably, the Air France incident was both a pilot and software problem. Although the software worked as designed, it contributed to the pilots' confusion. This was particularly true of the stall warning, which would reject angle of attack readings below about 60 knots forward airspeed but then sound again whenever the pilots did pitch down, the correct response to a high-altitude stall.

I always wondered - weren't there a simple glass of water in the cockpit. It wouldn't tell them the angle of attack of course, but could have used it as a sanity check.

The resulting flight path of this bug is a very common one. Going through the localizer and then turning back to re-intercept. And it's in the standard operating procedures for every airline/operator to monitor loc capture by the crew.

This "oops it didn't capture" also happens when you forget to select the right autopilot mode, which isn't an uncommon mistake for pilots in training.

It's actually so common that at airports with two runways close together they make aircraft capture the two localizers from different altitudes so there is no risk of collision when they fail to capture. (For example 18R and 18C in Amsterdam capture at 2000ft and 3000ft, this is done nearly every day)

So I'm going to say: Not really a big deal in terms of safety, easy to handle for the crew. But absolutely worth a safety report since unexpected auto flight behaviour needs an investigation and correction.

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