You wouldn’t build a website with a single point of failure, yet the argument here is it’s okay to engineer things badly because of the success rate of requests is high.

For air travel impacting human lives.

I think it speaks to current generation of leaders avoiding thought, consideration, foresight, insight, and just using any statistic that can justify a decision.

It’s a decline and one that also explains the excitement that LLMs/AI might be able to help us think less, know less, and perhaps be even less responsible for our work products.

This statement makes no sense. It has never been safer to fly, precisely because aviation is so dedicated to root cause analysis.

A whole door exploded out of a plane and

1. The plane did not suffer structural damage and could land safely 2. Nobody died because seat belts are mandatory 3. The crew is drilled over and over on what to do 4. The plane has extensive monitoring and logging so RCA is easier 5. The US funds a whole org dedicated to investigating this sort of thing and the results are public

and that's just the ones I can think of.

This is shocking precisely because aviation is so good at this. There are multiple layers in the swiss cheese model and this somehow made it past them.

Yeah, not to be totally insensitive, but 45,000 Americans died on our roads last year and basically no one has even a single fuck to give about it. For some reason all we ever complain about is the only safe transportation system we have.

People most certainly do give a fuck. The ones who are trying to fix it -- and the only ones who have a shot at it -- are held to impossible standards, far beyond what we hold humans to. A handful of accidents, even when they're not actually at fault, is enough to get an entire autonomous driving project shut down.

What we're hearing in this thread, from people who have clearly never done much of anything, is that passenger aviation needs to work exactly the same way. "If it can't be perfect, heads must roll. Surely that will fix it."

Ehhhh tightening bolts and not building MCAS with a single sensor and flight computer, whilst hiding the changes and selling a warning light…

If this is a genuine comment it’s worth thinking about why you reached straight to defend egregiously bad engineering and manufacturing.

Self driving is a different risk profile, even if you engineer it to the best of human knowledge — people still don’t understand why, and can’t ask why, the system in control of multiple ton vehicles being beta tested ‘in production with human lives’ and marketed as FSD, makes the decisions it makes. Or at least they can’t immediately tell it not to drive into trucks. Which is quite a straightforward thing to ask of a driving control system.

None of those asks are perfection, or more than we’d expect from a child let alone ‘humans’ as a species

You’re arguing past the GP. Just because it’s never been safer to fly doesn't mean we should relax any part of the rigid and high bar the aviation industry holds itself to. You’re both right…

> You know, they could be killing more than 0.5 people per ten billion passenger miles, right...?

You know that current management's numbers are a lot worse than that right?

This latest debacle is obviously due to some schlub on the factory floor who was more interested in checking his Facebook than installing bolts. Guillotining the CEO won't help.

I wish I knew what would, believe me. I have to deal with the exact same problem, luckily in a factory where there is a lot less at stake.

I’m not advocating for guillotining anyone. That’s absurd.

Then perhaps you meant to reply to a different subthread. I'm merely addressing the upstream poster's childish argument. ("Let the guillotine come out, I want to see heads roll.")

You did so by (as I understand) suggesting the status quo attracts competent leadership. I offered an argument that it does not. I agree we do not need to bring out guillotines. I disagree that Boeing has competent leadership. This is how Internet conversations work.

Oh, I definitely don't maintain that they have competent leadership, and clearly the status quo isn't ideal for attracting and retaining it. The board is clearly negligent.

I just disagree with some proposed solutions in the thread, that's all. Also don't necessarily agree that the situation was any better in the past.