Ship the Airplane: Reasons Why Boeing Cannot Recover (2020) (opens in new tab)

> Boeing deliberately did not want to use both AOA sensors because, as I said at the beginning, “a man with one AOA sensor knows what the angle of attack is, a man with two AOA sensors is never sure.”e. if Boeing used two sensors then it would have had to deal with the problem of what to do if they disagreed. And that would have meant training which would have violated ship the airplane.

Boeing has moved on from the days of doubling up the autopilot computer to perform MCAS, the software substitute for re-engineering the plane to be stable with the new, larger engines, to a pretty spectacular and fortunately non fatal mechanical failure ( it would have been fatal at higher altitudes)

It will be interesting to see how this new problem plays out.

I wonder what HN'ers have to say about this quote: (applies to aviation software)

   Third, its operating laws were embedded in software – not hardware.  That meant that changes could be made quickly, cheaply and with little or no oversight or scrutiny.  One of the aspects of software development in aviation is that there are far fewer standards, practices, or requirements for making software in aviation than there are for making hardware.