[WalterBright]

No, they don't. Their safety record is incredibly good, especially considering you're zipping along at 500 mph in an aluminum balloon at 30,000 feet with flaming engines and surrounded by jet fuel. They really are a triumph of engineering.

[hoka]

yes, but also with 100+ years of engineering, for far fewer companies/nations, and with trillions (more?) thrown at the discipline. Software engineering is, what, 50 years old, tops?

[WalterBright]

> Software engineering is, what, 50 years old, tops?

I've been working in this industry for nearly 45 years now. I still see endemic vulnerability to single points of failure, and little recognition of that.

Heck, the SolarWinds hack was first discovered by a security company because it had compromised their own internal systems and gone undetected for some time.

[Ragnarork]

Given that software engineering is part of aerospace engineering, some of it is part of that engineering success.

But a key aspect of this is that one does not develop software for airplanes the same way and with the same constraints/goals as other areas of software engineering.

If anything, aerospace engineering is a prime example of how software can be made more reliable by tolerating failures instead of relying on it not to fail, to come back to GP's point about failure-tolerant designs.

[WalterBright]

> aerospace engineering is a prime example of how software can be made more reliable by tolerating failures instead of relying on it not to fail

Exactly. I often have a hard time getting this point across, glad I succeeded.

[drtillberg]

Unfortunately, sophisticated threat actors are still very hard to defend against in aviation like in software.

[WalterBright]

In my day at Boeing, nobody considered that the pilot might be a bad actor. Unfortunately, that was a mistake. It turns out pilots can be bad, and now there are procedures for that.

[sofixa]

Funny that Boeing are capable of considering that, but not a single sensor failing and how that might impact a system designed to hide the actual aerodynamics of the plane.

Boeing really aren't a good example for anything besides negligence and how to game regulators.

[WalterBright]

I'm not going to make any excuses for MCAS's reliance on a single sensor.