[ta20240528]

Huh, a lot on the 737 Max situation was due to standardisation.

Boeing didn't want the time, expense, and hassle of certifying (= standardising) a new narrow-body aeroplane, so they continued to reuse the FAA type certificate (= standardised design) of the original 737 from 1966.

This meant they had to keep, inter alia, the short landing gear, which in turn made the wings lower to the ground, which forced them to position the new big engines ahead of the CG, which forced them to add the faulty MCAS computer, which killed all those people.

Admittedly the decision to use just a single sensor on said MCAS was due to systematic, decades long corruption and emasculation of the FAA.

[xethos]

The fact that every 737 MAX was the samew design also means that, upon rcognizing the flaw, every one could be grounded and fixed properly. We did not have to verify 15 different designs were all vulnerable due to Boeing trying to nickel and dime their customers (by making the third sensor esssentially a paid upgrade/addon)

[mixdup]

So the problem was that they diverged from the standard design in key important ways. The trick would be not to do that, to actually stick to the standard design. Or, to make sure that the impacts of deviations are fully accounted for and incorporated back into the overall design and project

Again, the standardization didn't cause the problem. Boeing's piss poor engineering culture did. There's no reason that they couldn't have built the plane how they wanted but in a way that didn't crash. Similarly, it's entirely possible that each of these nuclear reactors will be built with flexible designs per project that result in half of them melting down.

Safety and quality control is critical no matter what strategy they use

[padjo]

The point is that standardisation can act as an impediment to innovation. People then use creative engineering to remain technically compliant. This ultimately leads to hidden or hard to detect risks because everything is "to standard", except it's not.

[mixdup]

And on the other hand people can just design dangerous and dumb products even without the constraint of standardization.