[uuddlrlrbaba]

Weird take.

The theme throughout has been cost cutting and poor oversight for the sole benefit of shareholder profits.

A proper in house team would probably say, hey what happens when the sole sensor feeding our software is obstructed by a birthday balloon? Maybe we need an exponentially backoff instead of every 30 seconds. Maybe nose down actions shouldn't be automatically executed at low altitude.

What we see playing out is the result of delegation and "not my problem", outsourcing safety critical systems to the lowest bidder...

[ElevenLathe]

I understand that it may be more likely for this to happen with an in-house team, but my experience working in large companies makes me think it would still be unlikely. "Not my problem" is necessary armor at a company with 15 levels of management between ICs and the C-suite and a rich weft of (official and unofficial) "dotted lines", where every interaction outside your immediate team is fraught with political implications. Code monkeys, in-house or not, might not even know that they are working on software for an airplane, let alone a Boeing airplane, let alone in a safety-sensitive system. Even if they do, and understand that the overall plan they are contributing to is folly, there is often no linkage by which they can make that insight known to someone who can change things (often there is literally no one, including the CEO, who could change course even if they want to). Even trying to do so is often a career risk.

Large companies are mechanisms that run on their own. People have limited agency in a lot of situations but for big decisions ("our company's only real product is fundamentally dogshit, lets start over") there literally are no people on earth who can actually make them. They are pre-made by the structure of the company, capital markets, and historical accident.

[NullPrefix]

birthday balloon? In front of a landing plane at 170mph?

[neuralRiot]

In a safety-critical design you have to take in account what will happen if what cannot happen happens.

[jiggawatts]

Yes. It happens. In a recent news clip a pilot was interviewed about the MAX and he raised the risk of bird strike and birthday balloons as something that “happens all the time”.

[uuddlrlrbaba]

It actually happens, similarly to bird strikes or collisions with essentially any object that can float or fly into the path of a plane.

https://simpleflying.com/avianca-airbus-a319-balloon-strike/

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-09-22-me-41720-...

https://dronedj.com/2021/08/31/update-faa-says-envoy-air-pas...

[moosedev]

GP is (quite reasonably) using a deliberately slightly silly example as a rhetorical flourish. I would do the same. Think of it of a stand-in or totem for all of the possibilities (from silly to very real) that leap into horrifying life in an engineer's brain when they learn that a critical system has a single point of failure.