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Comment by tobinfricke | Hacker News Reader

Really? There have been plenty of high-profile crashes due to weird Airbus design decisions.

I'm thinking of this one primarily:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

>>Confused, Bonin exclaimed, "I don't have control of the airplane any more now", and two seconds later, "I don't have control of the airplane at all!"[43] Robert responded to this by saying, "controls to the left", and took over control of the aircraft.[84][45] He pushed his side-stick forward to lower the nose and recover from the stall; however, Bonin was still pulling his side-stick back. The inputs cancelled each other out and triggered an audible "dual input" warning.<<

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Airbus made some design decisions that, in hindsight, weren't great but the side sticks aren't one of them. The captain should have locked out the other controls but didn't. As Air France proved a couple years ago, even force feedback in the controls won't fix the problem of two pilots providing separate inputs and not communicating.

There is a huge difference between a failure due to a bad design detail (can be checked for and corrected typically) and an okay design with bad manufacturing (the problem could be literally everywhere).

In the worst case you might even have to disassemble and reassemble the whole plane to really make sure you are not sitting on a ticking timebomb. And this might not be straightforward given the amount of glue involved in modern airplanes.

Of "good design with shoddy implementation" and "bad design with good implementation"

- I'm not sure which is worse

Would you rather fly A) in the play where ten screws were misdesigned and later fixed or B) in the plane where the design was okay, but a unknown number of screws are missing, loose or wrong although there was a check?

There appears to be a manufacturing issue at Boeing. Missing bolts is not a design matter.

AF447 was clearly human error, not mechanical nor Airbus' fault. It was not because of bolts that were not tightened enough.

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