[SystemSafety] A Gem from Bloomberg

[paul_e.bennett at topmail.co.uk]

On 09/11/2019 at 7:22 AM, "Peter Bernard Ladkin" <ladkin at causalis.com> wrote:
>
>An article on the Boeing 737 MAX SW revision:
>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-08/delays-in-
>boeing-max-return-began-with-near-crash-in-
>simulator?fbclid=IwAR1R6_y2DtwhHi5wq9kaOCRLMEcwE2cxIeAu_-
>aivpR2k_swaZZxYTQr5ok
>
>which includes this gem: "Manufacturers may have to demonstrate 
>with extensive testing that a
>software failure leading to a crash would be as rare as one in a 
>billion."
>
>If that is so, then, to any reasonable degree of confidence, we 
>have a mathematical proof that the
>aircraft will never return to service.
>
>How is it that, 26 years after it was pointed out clearly in two 
>articles in the
>software-engineering literature, and 22 years after Table D.1 in 
>Annex D of Part 7 of the
>international standard for functional safety of E/E/PE systems was 
>published, which includes the
>necessary figures, engineers can suggest such nonsense to 
>journalists?

I thought we had also established that software can never
compensate for poor design of the overall system. Using software
as a plaster for poor aircraft system design decisions and relying
on only one channel of information to do so was always going to
lead to a disaster at some point.

Regards

Paul E. Bennett IEng MIET
Systems Engineer
Lunar Mission One Ambassador
-- 
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