boeing – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Shoddy Software Is Eating The World, And People Are Dying As A Result

from the sometimes-it's-too-late-to-issue-an-update dept

Two recent crashes involving Boeing 737 Max jets are still being investigated. But there is a growing view that anti-stall software used on the plane may have caused a “repetitive uncommanded nose-down“, as a preliminary report into the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines plane puts it. Gregory Travis has been a pilot for 30 years, and a software developer for more than 40 years. Drawing on that double expertise, he has written an illuminating article for the IEEE Spectrum site, entitled “How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer” (free account required). It provides an extremely clear explanation of the particular challenges of designing the Boeing 737 Max, and what they tell us about modern software development.

Airline companies want jets to be as cost-effective as possible. That means using engines that are as efficient as possible in converting fuel into thrust, which turns out to mean engines that are as big as possible. But that was a problem for the hugely-popular Boeing 737 series of planes. There wasn’t enough room under the wing simply to replace the existing jet engines with bigger, more fuel-efficient versions. Here’s how Boeing resolved that issue — and encountered a new challenge:

The solution was to extend the engine up and well in front of the wing. However, doing so also meant that the centerline of the engine’s thrust changed. Now, when the pilots applied power to the engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to “pitch up,” or raise its nose.

The solution to that problem was the “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,” or MCAS. Its job was simply to stop the human pilots from putting the plane in a situation where the nose might go up too far, causing the plane to stall — and crash. According to Travis, even though the Boeing 737 Max has two flight management computers, only one is active at a time. It bases its decisions purely on the sensors that are found on one side of the plane. Since it does not cross-check with sensors on the other side of the plane, it has no way of knowing if a sensor is producing wildly inaccurate information. It assumes that the data is correct, and responds accordingly:

In a pinch, a human pilot could just look out the windshield to confirm visually and directly that, no, the aircraft is not pitched up dangerously. That’s the ultimate check and should go directly to the pilot’s ultimate sovereignty. Unfortunately, the current implementation of MCAS denies that sovereignty. It denies the pilots the ability to respond to what’s before their own eyes.

Like someone with narcissistic personality disorder, MCAS gaslights the pilots. And it turns out badly for everyone. “Raise the nose, HAL.” “I?m sorry, Dave, I?m afraid I can?t do that.”

The coders who wrote the MCAS software for the 737 Max don’t seem to have worried about the risks of using sensors from just one side in the computer’s determination of an impending stall. This major design blunder may have cost the lives of hundreds of people, and shows that “safety doesn?t come first — money comes first, and safety’s only utility in that regard is in helping to keep the money coming,” according to Travis. But he points out that it also reveals something more general, and much deeper: the growing use of software code that is simply not good enough.

I believe the relative ease — not to mention the lack of tangible cost — of software updates has created a cultural laziness within the software engineering community. Moreover, because more and more of the hardware that we create is monitored and controlled by software, that cultural laziness is now creeping into hardware engineering — like building airliners. Less thought is now given to getting a design correct and simple up front because it’s so easy to fix what you didn?t get right later.

Every time a software update gets pushed to my Tesla, to the Garmin flight computers in my Cessna, to my Nest thermostat, and to the TVs in my house, I’m reminded that none of those things were complete when they left the factory — because their builders realized they didn’t have to be complete. The job could be done at any time in the future with a software update.

Back in August 2011, Netscape founder and VC Marc Andreessen wrote famously that “software is eating the world“. He was almost right. It turns that shoddy software is eating the world, sometimes with fatal consequences.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: 737 max, eating the world, safety, software, unfinished, updates
Companies: boeing

Boeing Accused Of Covert, Coordinated Op-Ed Smear Campaign Against Space X

from the disinformation-nation dept

Thu, Oct 11th 2018 10:46am - Karl Bode

For years we’ve noted how the American press has an absolutely horrible tendency to run guest Op-Eds without disclosing the author’s financial conflicts of interest(s). Jesse Jackson, for example, can sometimes be found comparing efforts to bring competition to the cable box to racism in the 60s, without disclosing the cable industry’s underlying influence. Similarly, former Representative and fair use champion Rick Boucher can often be found praising CISPA, denying a lack of competition in broadband or attacking net neutrality in Op-Ed pages nationwide on behalf of AT&T with zero disclosure of his real financial motivations.

The act of republishing these missives without clearly disclosing financial conflicts of interests isn’t just unethical, it pollutes the national discourse, undermines already shaky trust in media, and contributes to a sound wall of disinformation as giant companies try to sell their latest megamerger, pass anti-consumer regulations and legislation, undermine a competitor, or justify terrible behavior.

One more recent example of this phenomenon comes courtesy of Boeing, which is being accused of running a covert smear campaign against Space X via media outlets that fail to adequately disclose ulterior financial motives of Op-Ed authors.

Back in August, just around the time that Boeing was hyping the company’s Starliner spacecraft program, a series of Op-Eds began showing up in newspapers nationwide attacking Space X and its allegedly unsafe fueling practices. The articles, which appeared everywhere from the Houston Chronicle to the Washington Times, all purported to simply be worried about astronaut safety. All were penned by Richard Hagar, who worked for NASA during the Apollo program, but now resides in Tennessee. All implied repeatedly that Space X was ignoring safety standards and putting astronauts at risk.

But amusingly, when Ars Technica tried to track down Hagar, they discovered that he didn’t actually write the vast majority of the Op-Eds published in countless news outlets nationwide under his name. Instead, the missives were penned by a PR and policy shop with an expertise in astroturf and other disingenuous messaging:

“To try to understand his viewpoint, Ars attempted to reach Hagar by phone and email in September. In the course of this process, we learned that he did not actually submit many of these op-eds.

In fact, based upon our research, at least four of the six op-eds that we located were submitted by two people with gmail.com addresses. Their names were Josh Brevik and Casey Murray. Further research revealed that two people with these names worked as “associates” at a Washington, DC-based public relations firm named Law Media Group or LMG. We reached out to multiple editors at papers that ran the op-eds, and they confirmed that no LMG affiliation was disclosed to them. Attempts to reach Julian Epstein, the chief executive of LMG, by phone and email were unsuccessful.”

Boeing is an LMG client, and has worked previously for the company on past projects by “developing messaging” and crafting a “social media campaign amplifying our nationwide chorus of genuine American voices supporting Boeing.” Boeing is also Space X’s only competitor in the commercial crew program, so the mathematics here should be fairly obvious. Law Media Group (LMG) was busted for this exact sort of thing ten years ago and apparently absolutely nothing has changed, making it abundantly clear just how little most people care about this sort of disinformation.

News outlets have little incentive to crack down on this kind of disingenuous dreck, as they don’t want to anger the companies footing the bill. Most Americans are totally clueless about the perils on zero transparency in this regard, so public pressure to actually do something about it for many media outlets remains largely nonexistent. And while you could pass a law mandating that corporations are free to speak as long as they speak for themselves, countless corporations would certainly be quick to claim their ability to spread misleading nonsense via covert intermediaries violates their First Amendment rights.

Aside from applying continuous public pressure on news outlets to behave more transparently and ethically, it’s a problem that doesn’t seem to have an obvious solution.

Filed Under: disinformation, fake news, opeds, smear campaign, space
Companies: boeing, law media group, spacex

DailyDirt: Spaceplanes 2.0

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The Space Shuttle was a cool idea, but it never accomplished the goal of providing a relatively low-cost route to space. The concept of reusable space ships is still attractive, but it really depends on how much it takes to refurbish them before they attempt another launch. A few different organizations are already testing some reusable space vehicles (and Boeing has its X-37B that’s orbiting somewhere above us right now). Here are just a few more spaceplanes that might join the new reusable space race.

The EU has its Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) robotic space plane that was tested last year. The IXV is scheduled to fly another test in 2019, and it might be operating by the time Elon Musk is on Mars.
DARPA’s XS-1 spaceplane project has a goal of flying 10 times in 10 days and putting a few tons of satellite payload into space — for less than $5 million per flight. That’s a pretty ambitious plan, especially if it’s supposed to start testing by 2019 (and they’re still narrowing down the technology).
The Skylon concept spaceplane is a single-stage-to-orbit dream. It might not be hard to explain how it could work, but it’ll sure be difficult to actually build a working prototype.