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Software Hardware Technology

Boeing Discovers Issue With 737 Max Flight Computers (cnn.com) 96

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Boeing's troubled 737 Max has run into a new glitch. During a recent technical review involving the Max, Boeing observed an issue with the plane's flight computers, according to a source familiar with the matter. The source said the issue is not related to the software revisions Boeing made to address the cause of two fatal crashes that killed 346 people, and would not occur during flight. The Max has been grounded since March following the second of those crashes.

The computer issue was observed when booting up the computers on a Max and involves the so-called software power up monitoring function, which checks for anomalies when turning on the computers. It's similar to the steps any computer might make when first turned on. The source said the process of turning on the computers is performed when the plane is on the ground, rather than in flight. The source said the test was intended to find any issues like this one and that Boeing would fix the problem.

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Boeing Discovers Issue With 737 Max Flight Computers

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  • by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @10:08AM (#59632720)
    > The computer issue was observed when booting up the computers on a Max and involves the so-called software power up monitoring function, which checks for anomalies when turning on the computers

    They just need a new software to monitor the software power up monitoring function
  • by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @10:21AM (#59632750) Homepage
    It's cheaper to blame the pilots, so they do.
    • by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @11:04AM (#59632834)

      It's cheaper to blame the pilots, so they do.

      Usually it's the pilots who make the "mistakes" though. They are the one part of the system that is unpredictable in how they will respond. Everything else, with few exceptions, does not randomly change it's behavior. (MCAS system being a rare example).

      So it's not just cheaper to blame the pilots, it's usually correct. But, if you look at the total number of incidents, including the ones that didn't end up damaging the aircraft or killing somebody, the pilots save a LOT more lives than they kill.

      • Usually it's the pilots who make the "mistakes" though.

        That is why a well designed system minimizes the risk of human error, which is not the case with the Boeing 737 MAX.

        So it's not just cheaper to blame the pilots, it's usually correct.

        I do not think so. All the latest aeroplane accidents I remember were either the result of technical failure or hostile action.

        • Really?
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
          Seems like a pilot error - didn't go around.
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
          Apparently didn't deice.
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
          Too steep approach resulting in a bounced landing.

          The reason you remember only technical failure and hostile action accidents is that since these accidents had an obvious cause.

          • So, three randomly picked cherries.

            According the pretty good Wikipedia article on on Pilot error [wikipedia.org] "For scheduled air transport, pilot error typically accounts for just over half of worldwide accidents with a known cause."

            So about half of the accidents (from a very low accident rate) are attributed to pilot error - so the original claim of "usually" is wrong or misleading (just over half does not justify airily describing that as "usually").

            And since schedule air transport continues a decades long accident ra

            • Before you run around accusing other people of random cherrypicking (whatever that is supposed to be) take a closer look. All of them are from 2019.
              You couldn't remember any of the latest accidents caused by a pilot error, I've shown you some, proving that your memory is very selective. End of story.

            • Pilot error is the old go-to.

              But when you start digging deeper in just about every case since the late 1970s (when Human Factors got into its stride) the mistakes have almost always been the result of combinations of

              Workplace pressure (time pressures from employer/pressure to get the job done)
              Oversights on long manual checklists due to interruptions whilst working down them.
              Fixation on a target (getting job done, landing, taking off, task at hand, etc, to the exclusion of all else)
              Situational overload when

      • Usually it's the pilots who make the "mistakes" though

        Of course. Pilots should just guess what they were not taught!

      • by bobby ( 109046 )

        Everything else, with few exceptions, does not randomly change it's behavior. (MCAS system being a rare example).

        I don't mean to nit-pick, but I politely disagree on a very important technicality: MCAS did exactly what it was programmed to do. Bad programming, and bad overall project management, are the problems.

        • I politely disagree on a very important technicality: MCAS did exactly what it was programmed to do.

          Right you are! MCAS was programmed to murder humans, and it did.

        • Everything else, with few exceptions, does not randomly change it's behavior. (MCAS system being a rare example).

          I don't mean to nit-pick, but I politely disagree on a very important technicality: MCAS did exactly what it was programmed to do. Bad programming, and bad overall project management, are the problems.

          I'm not disagreeing with you on that, but there was one place where the MCAS did exhibit random behavior and that was on bootup. At that point, it was not known exactly which of the two AOA sensors it would pick as its single reference. I believe in the case of the Lion Air aircraft, this caused the failure of one AOA sensor to go unfixed for multiple flights. So one aircrew was able to recover from the MCAS problem and land safely, but even though they complained about the problem, mechanics where unsuc

      • It's cheaper to blame the pilots, so they do.

        Usually it's the pilots who make the "mistakes" though. They are the one part of the system that is unpredictable in how they will respond. Everything else, with few exceptions, does not randomly change it's behavior. (MCAS system being a rare example).

        So it's not just cheaper to blame the pilots, it's usually correct. But, if you look at the total number of incidents, including the ones that didn't end up damaging the aircraft or killing somebody, the pilots save a LOT more lives than they kill.

        Although your post is on the pilots side generally it is important to realize that poor UI design (including alerting and task management issues) tends to show up as "pilot error", ignoring the fact that the system must be designed so that human perfection is not required or expected to manage it successfully. The long decline in airliner accident rates is not due to pilots becoming more competent, but by making systems where it is harder to make these "errors".

        • It's cheaper to blame the pilots, so they do.

          Usually it's the pilots who make the "mistakes" though. They are the one part of the system that is unpredictable in how they will respond. Everything else, with few exceptions, does not randomly change it's behavior. (MCAS system being a rare example).

          So it's not just cheaper to blame the pilots, it's usually correct. But, if you look at the total number of incidents, including the ones that didn't end up damaging the aircraft or killing somebody, the pilots save a LOT more lives than they kill.

          Although your post is on the pilots side generally it is important to realize that poor UI design (including alerting and task management issues) tends to show up as "pilot error", ignoring the fact that the system must be designed so that human perfection is not required or expected to manage it successfully. The long decline in airliner accident rates is not due to pilots becoming more competent, but by making systems where it is harder to make these "errors".

          You are quite correct and the pilot to aircraft interface has been the subject ot a LOT of attention and engineering for the last few decades. In fact, the MCAS itself was a direct *result* of this kind of engineering where they were attempting to make the aircraft's stall characteristics at low speed make sense to pilots, where it takes more and more pressure on the controls to increase the AOA as you approach a stall. The 737 Max, when going slow and approaching a stall, actually has lower control pressu

      • Boeing's 737 cockpits (in particular) are such an ergonomic disaster that the wonder is that more people haven't been killed due to pilots suffering situational overload.

        Cockpit ergonomics are a major field of study in Human Factors and most of them are utterly ROTTEN when the shit hits the fan.

        Even when things have been addressed in more modern designs this hasn't been regressed into older layouts (or designs inherited from older layouts) and training to specficially alert pilots about the perils of situat

  • by uthanda ( 325531 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @10:26AM (#59632752) Homepage

    Reading this story and the other like it reminded me of the old joke about what it would be like if Microsoft made cars. (found in full here: https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pn... [harvard.edu]), quoting in part:

    1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
    2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
    3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

    Sounds like the Microsoft of old is starting to make planes across the river in the Seattle area.

    • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      I mean the list isn't exactly the same but that isn't that terribly far from what you see with self-driving cars... software developers first attempt at cars.

    • Reading this story and the other like it reminded me of the old joke about what it would be like if Microsoft made cars. (found in full here: https://www.hcs.harvard.edu/pn... [harvard.edu]), quoting in part:

      1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day. 2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car. 3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

      Sounds like the Microsoft of old is starting to make planes across the river in the Seattle area.

      Just wait till they start re-sequencing the DNA of your grandchildren.

    • by zieroh ( 307208 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @11:32AM (#59632876)

      3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

      Sounds like the Microsoft of old is starting to make planes across the river in the Seattle area.

      The veiled implication in this old bit of humor is that computer science lacks the rigor, precision, and reliability that other disciplines (e.g. mechanical engineering) have achieved. And it's true: the software industry does a piss-poor job of keeping the scale of software complexity on par with the ability of the actual people who have to find and fix the problems.

      Of course, this largely comes down to the fact that there's nothing else bounding the complexity of software except our own sensibilities. If a mechanical engineer submitted a design for an automotive transmission that required 1,000 gears, they would be summarily dismissed. If a software engineer checks in a module with 1,000 lines of code, nobody will even notice.

      I kind of wish RAM wasn't so cheap. Maybe it would force us to collectively improve.

      • I kind of wish RAM wasn't so cheap

        No "ought to be enough for everybody" joke?

      • by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @02:42PM (#59633260)

        Also, making hardware more complex generally increases the cost of that hardware, so that path is self limiting. Transfering hardware complexity into software both reduces the hardware cost and increases the complexity of the software.

      • The same thing applies to laws and regulation.

        There is little incentive to keep the tax law complexity down, since it can the details can just be delegated to computers (and/or tax experts, an expertise that shouldn't need to exist).

        Or Obamacare. Or most any other "modern" law.

        Supposedly "ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it". But is that really still true when nobody actually knows all the details of the law? At best they might have a fair approximation of the areas of law they intera

        • "There is little incentive to keep the tax law complexity down, since it can the details can just be delegated to computers (and/or tax experts, an expertise that shouldn't need to exist)."

          When New Zealand simplified its Tax and Customs structures in the 1980s, it ended up laying off 1/3 of its tax and customs staff and getting things done FASTER

          So yes, it can be done. (imagine a 6 page tax return for 90% of wage/salary earners, which in practice was only 3 pages you needed to fill in)

      • "If a mechanical engineer submitted a design for an automotive transmission that required 1,000 gears, they would be summarily dismissed. If a software engineer checks in a module with 1,000 lines of code, nobody will even notice."

        It's the mantra of "software paid by the yard"

        One of my cousins back in the days of FACOM manframes would regularly rant about this - contract indian programmers would submit 20 pages of code for tasks that local programmers were doing in 30-40 lines - and those 20 pages of code w

    • I like the "7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying". Windows asking stupid questions as an insult to ergonomics.
    • We can laugh of this joke, but frequenting Tesla-forums (considering buying one) it appears Tesla did not know this joke before creating their car.

      https://teslaownersgroup.co.uk... [teslaownersgroup.co.uk]

      Shut all doors and keep them shut.
      Place foot on the brake.
      Hold both scroll wheels + both buttons above scroll wheels for 30+ seconds (total of 4 fingers required)
      Car resets.
      Continue to hold foot on the brake.
      Car jumps back to life.

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @10:58AM (#59632822)

    They obviously will have made as sure as they can that something like this does not happen. Yet it happened. This basically means they do not know how to do it anymore.

    That makes it highly likely that they cannot actually fix the problem, and will instead have to fake something (again).

    • They obviously will have made as sure as they can that something like this does not happen. Yet it happened. This basically means they do not know how to do it anymore.

      You would have to say the same thing about Microsoft, Apple, and the Linux kernel developers. Or are you suggesting that none of them are really trying to avoid bugs in their code?

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Obviously not. None of the examples you are given are in a situation even remotely like Boeing. Boeing is facing an existential crisis and it looks very much like they are incompetent in dealing with the engineering aspects of it. Also, very rare exceptions alike, none of the examples you give have ever screwed up this badly when fixing a known and exceptionally critical bug. Well, Microsoft may have. Probably several times. But even Microsoft has not murdered 350 people just to save some money.

  • by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @11:01AM (#59632828)
    And they think they can make automated driving work.
    • Boeing is making self-driving cars? Oh no...
      • You miss my point.. if a company like Boeing cannot make a computer save enough for an airplane, self driving has much more complexity than flying. If all cars are self driving, one glitchy computer would cause far more dire consequences than having one in a plane.
        • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

          Really what;s the largest loss of life due to a single vehicle crash? The largest loss of life from a single aircraft incident is 587. Anyway by all accounts Boeing has sunk as a company to the point where nobody trusts them anymore and taken the FAA with it. In the past the FAA re-certifying the 737MAX would have been enough to get it flying world wide, not anymore.

  • by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @11:06AM (#59632842) Homepage
    Boeing Employees Mocked F.A.A. and ‘Clowns’ Who Designed 737 Max [nytimes.com] (Jan. 9, 2020)

    You can download "Internal Boeing communications about the 737 Max [nyt.com]". (PDF file, 35 megabytes) Quote from the next story: The PDF file is "117 pages of damning internal communications".

    I Honestly Don’t Trust Many People at Boeing: A Broken Culture Exposed [nytimes.com]. (Jan. 13, 2020)
  • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @11:12AM (#59632846)

    If Trump went on twitter and fired Boeing, just like on his tv show.

    • If Trump went on twitter and fired Boeing, just like on his tv show.

      He did that, or at least tried, when he complained about the cost of VC-25B (Air Force One replacement program). This was before he took office (but after the election) or shortly after he took the oath of office. I recall it got Boeing's attention and they just happened to find ways to lower the costs.

      That was probably a one billion dollar tweet.

  • by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @11:15AM (#59632854)

    Wow, they are going though this aircraft with a fined tooth comb apparently. The FAA is going to be darned sure Boeing has crossed every "T" and dotted every "I" on every jot and tittle before they give Boeing their type certification back. They are looking at every rivet, screw, bolt, wire, connector, byte of code from the top tip of the tail to the front of the nose cone with a microscope.

    When they get done with this aircraft and the FAA agrees to certify it again, it will be the safest plane in the sky.

    And, in case you want to know. Yes, I'd fly in one.

    • Myself, my husband, and most everyone else, however, will avoid any MAX aircraft for a considerable amount of time. Until they prove themselves after a few years of uneventful service, perhaps.
    • You're a lot more optimistic than me. I'll never step foot in one. They should send them all to the scrap heap and start over.

      • by Morky ( 577776 )
        I completely agree. This is the only solution. We need the government to subsidize them with a long term loan to carry it out, but the 737 Max needs to die if Boeing is to continue.
    • And, in case you want to know. Yes, I'd fly in one.

      Thank you for being a tester!

      My family will avoid it like the plague.

      We will also be on the lookout for any fancy renaming of the model. As a matter of fact, we will do our best to avoid Boeing completely.

    • It would have been the safest plane in the sky in the 1970s as its airframe has been designed to very old safety standards.

    • They were supposed to go over it with a fine tooth comb before certifying it to fly in the first place. This is why safety reviews are required. The fact that many problems are surfacing now shows how seriously defective this nonsense about "self certification" is.

      And not all of the problems that they granted waivers to originally can be fixed.

      The 737 Max engines violate ground clearance regulations - they are too close to the ground and are thus vulnerable to debris ingestion, and in a two engine plane thi

    • The 737 Max can never be a safe plane, its airframe is unsafe. Software hacks cannot change that, only redesigning the airframe can, then it will be a new plane. As 737 Max actually is - that is Boeing's big lie. They tried to fool the FAA into believe that it is not a new airframe when it actually is. A super crappy new airframe at that.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @11:19AM (#59632856)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @11:54AM (#59632916)

    The reason you see old tech across the board in American Aerospace is that companies are being lazy in certifying their toolchain, hardwarechain, etc. Rather than pick an actually certified safe chip (Like any ASIL-D offering these days) they picked a "already certified" chip, even if there was zero chance it would be re-certified today.

    So the MAX8 is flying with 286s. GE Aerospace is putting EOL Coldfire v4e in control modules for their engines & power. Who knows what else is being strung along since "Oh, we certified that in 1982, no reason to ever certify a new chip".

    These certifications need to expire and get renewed so that it's not a cost savings to just shove something from 30 years ago in there. Turns out they've done a lot of tweaking since the 286 and have FPUs and DSPs designed for doing fancy control algorithms. Stuff that could have probably helped.

    At the very least, the G4/PPC750 is extra terrestrial and certified for 'failure is not an option'.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      These certifications need to expire and get renewed

      This isn't the PC business. Manufacturers don't have to keep up with increasingly bloated web pages and applications. Once the processor and code have been shown to meet the requirements of an application, that application doesn't change. And every time you port the application to new hardware or tool chains, you risk introducing far more errors than the newer platform would have solved.

      • The problem is they need development boards and toolchains for these 20 year old processors. Motorola still makes the chip but not the dev board. The toolchain works great in Windows 2000 but certainly not Windows 10. I don't have a problem with tried and true hardware but the support just isn't there.

      • by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @12:35PM (#59632990)

        Once the processor and code have been shown to meet the requirements of an application

        Boeing's Software Fix For The 737 MAX Problem Overwhelms The Plane's Computer [moonofalabama.org]

        https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]

        that application doesn't change

        It did change. If nothing changed planes wouldn't be pitched into the ground.

        Additionally you didn't address my core complaint with non-expiring hardware in that, if you would try to certify that hardware/toolchain today it wouldn't pass. Chip vendors are making ASIL-D chipsets designed for use in this space that were never evaluated because it was cheaper to be lazy.

        you risk introducing.

        Then your V&V testing is inadequate and likely not done completely or correct in the first place. It sounds like they have a bunch of bandaids all over the place which is not the correct way to address edge cases either.

        far more errors than the newer platform would have solved.

        Greater or fewer errors than 2 loaded planes getting driven into the ground so that Boeing could do the least amount of work as possible?

        • Then your V&V testing is inadequate and likely not done completely or correct in the first place. It

          sounds like they have a bunch of bandaids all over the place which is not the correct way to address edge cases either.

          far more errors than the newer platform would have solved.

          Greater or fewer errors than 2 loaded planes getting driven into the ground so that Boeing could do the least amount of work as possible?

          Righteous indignation is not a substitute for engineering qualifi

    • Didn't the space shuttle use radiation hardened 386 chips up until the fleet was put out of service? Just because a chip can't run modern crapware does not make it useless. If anything, it forces out bloat which will be really bad news in a system that must be more than 99.99% reliable running a real time OS.
      • Coming from Automotive where our 'newest' chip is based on the G4, there is a point at which it's *not* worth it.

        If these chips were compared against their modern peers there is no chance they would pass certification nor the subsystems they went into.

        If anything, it forces out bloat

        Except it didn't. The chips couldn't handle all of the software system changes. The only 'bloat' it forced out was a potentially safe system.

        99.99% reliable running a real time OS.

        So like your powertrain? We have chips for that. 32 bit ones that run a few hundred megahertz with ECC ram and lock-ste [nxp.com]

        • The whole point of the exercise was that is not a new plane but more lipstick on a half a century old pig.

        • The newest chips I deal with in brand new cars is the Infineon TriCore, and those are 20 year old designs. But, they just work. ARM is trying to get into the field with ISO 26262 certified Cortex-A72 based offerings running in lockstep, but for most automotive applications given modern car electronic design, itâ(TM)s overkill and overcomplicated. I am curious to see who the first automaker is to integrate those.

  • by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Saturday January 18, 2020 @12:30PM (#59632970)
    and has to be rebooted, damn!!! should have thought about that one, "designed by clowns and supervised by monkeys"
  • Don't tell me it's Windows
  • It doesn't need a computer at all. It was just a corner cutting move to avoid re-certification costs. Take out the computer, get a new airworthiness cert, and you're good. The airplane would be flying right now if they did the right thing. At this point, Boeing is just looking for a bailout. They already got nice tax write-offs

    • Sure, except for being dynamically unstable.

    • It doesn't need a computer at all. It was just a corner cutting move to avoid re-certification costs.

      That sounds about right. The problem the pilots face can be summed up in a single sentence.

      The older 737 cockpit has separate on/off control switches for independent electrically-assisted and automatic trim systems. On the 737 MAX, a combined switch is provided and the pilot cannot turn off the MCAS without also disabling electrically-assisted trim. A manual trim wheel is provided, but is not powerful enough to adjust the stabilizer in all flight conditions. Activating the powered trim system can be necessary and this also activates the MCAS.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Take out the computer, get a new airworthiness cert, and you're good.

      Or, put in a separate switch for MCAS and the electrically assisted trim control, like the older 737 and unlike the newer 737 NG. Then tell the pilots what those switches do and when to use them.

      The airplane would be flying right now if they did the right thing.

      The "right thing' is open to debate. This is a complex issue and it took a string of events to even reveal it as a problem. The MCAS had a single point of failure in that it had only one

      • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        The EASA (EU equivalent of the FAA) have already said that they won't be taking the FAA's word on the 737 MAX at a minimum. It's part of the reason why the 737 MAX is not back in the air because Boeing can't buddy up with their friends in the FAA this time around because getting it back in the air in the US if the EASA says no is basically pointless. They are having to do the work they should have done in the first place and it's throwing up more problems than just the MCAS. Which is why in part it is takin

        • getting it back in the air in the US if the EASA says no is basically pointless.

          It's not pointless. There's 400 airframes now grounded and this is having an effect on the industry. If the 737 MAX can fly on US routes then that frees up similar airframes to fly elsewhere in the world. Because these airframes exist there is a sunk cost in them, and to recover that cost means getting them flying in some way. The USA is a big market and so could likely take in these planes as other airframes flow out to other nations.

          Issues with the certification of the plane will make it's value, and

    • You and who modded you up have no clue. Please do read up and inform yourselves.

      The MAX is not certifiable, either under the antique or a shiny new certificate, without bandaids to compensate control issues in low and high speed regimes due to aerodynamics resulting from its problematic airframe+engine geometry.

      These bandaids were kept under the rug to avoid the need for simulator training and a different type qualification for the MAX.

      To boot the bandaids were incredibly shoddily implemented.

  • The computer issue was observed when booting up the computers on a Max and involves the so-called software power up monitoring function, which checks for anomalies when turning on the computers. It's similar to the steps any computer might make when first turned on.”

    It's for razor sharp technical analysis such as the above, that keep's me coming back here.
  • Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
  • very confidence inspiring all these problems that suddenly surface.
    you start to wonder what else might be 'buggy', at a certain point the trust must be fully gone.

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