thewayne: (Default)
Because India has such a fantastic and established commercial aerospace industry and you can get incredibly amazing code written for $9 and hour.

To recap, the 737 Max is a plane designed to compete with less expensive Airbus aircraft. It is different from previous 737s in that they moved the engines significantly ahead of the wing, radically changing flight characteristics, requiring new software.

Boeing thought that their processes were so mature that the software could be sent out to an Indian contractor that charges ridiculously low rates, and the result was they got horrible code that had to go back and forth between Boeing and the contractor, negating any savings because the experienced and mature coders would have gotten it right pretty much the first time.

Two planes have crashed because of flight control software that thought the plane was stalling during the take-off phase. The software insisted on pushing the nose down, which during take-off means you're dead. In an Airbus, when the flight control software does that, you just pull back on the stick and it overrides and cuts out the software. No problem. Not so in the 737 Max. You have to remember to hit a certain series of switches or disengage a circuit breaker, which in the heat of the moment as the ground is rushing up at you, is an extremely hard thing to do.

With the 737 Max, when the software insists on pushing the nose down, no amount of force trying to pull the control column back will make any difference at all. Only doing the override sequence or pulling the circuit breaker will save you.

This information is going to slaughter Boeing in court.

Thank you, profit culture that says to cut all expenses to the bone!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers


Edit to add:
A week and a half ago at the Paris Air Show, the International Airlines Group (IAG), which owns, among other things, Aer Lingus, British Airways and Iberia, signed a letter of intent to buy TWO HUNDRED 737 Max jets! Somehow Boeing convinced them to refresh their fleet, switching over from Airbus A320s. Curious, indeed: hookers & blow, bribery, blackmail, all of the above....

Letter of intent being rescinded in 3... 2...

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/paris-air-show-boeing-gets-order-for-200-max-jets/

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    1 23
45678910
1112 131415 1617
18 19 20 212223 24
25262728 293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated May. 31st, 2025 08:35 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios