• FrogmanL@lemmy.world
    33·
    3 days ago

    If anyone is s curious, I work in that industry, and that is why it is so regulated. A lot of things have to go wrong for any single person’s mistake to matter. We test the heck out of aircraft. Some of these tests are absurd, but they’re meant to prove that the code still works even if the plane flies through the twilight zone.

    • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world
      13·
      3 days ago

      I also work in the industry and yet you’ve got a company that didn’t follow the rules of redundancy, locked a normally required safety critical architecture and software of using redundant sensor behind paid DLC and caused two fatal crashes.

  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
    65·
    4 days ago

    Reminds me of a joke:

    The faculty of the engineering department at a university are gifted a free vacation retreat. Once everyone is in their seats on the plane, the captain announces that the very plane they’re sitting in was designed and built by their own students.

    Chaos breaks out as the passengers scramble for the exits, until only one professor remains, calmly and confidently poised in his seat.

    Naturally, he is asked why he didn’t panic like his colleagues. With a knowing smile he replies “I know the abilities of my students, I’ve seen what they’re capable of accomplishing when they apply themselves. I can assure you this piece of shit will never start.”

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    821·
    4 days ago

    “Software for airplanes” is a broad term. If I ever get into a position to make software for airplanes, it’s probably not going to be things that can crash the plane. The entertainment system is still software for airplanes.

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
      16·
      3 days ago

      People in the past have used the entertainment bus to get into the flight telemetry data, hopefully only in a read-only state, but that will only be true if you trust the competence of the IT group that set up the programming for the switches.

      Just be careful of where you try to write data and you should be fine! (and stay away from /dev/wing0 and /dev/wing1 on the network mount!)

      • BombOmOm@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        12 hours ago

        Ugh, why the hell aren’t those air-gapped?

        Same thing in cars. Why is the infotainment system that is connected to the internet not air-gapped from the critical car functions?

        These things aren’t hard to do. I guess we just need people to die before we take such basic safety measures.

    • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
      10·
      4 days ago

      You’re right. The other side of that is I did a little contract work for a company that is working on software for unmanned commercial flights.

      Those guys actually made me feel better. They were all super smart, meticulous, and incredibly good at their jobs. It was the first environment I’ve ever been in where I felt like I could just barely keep up. I always felt one commit away from fucking things up. So I moseyed on down the road as soon as the thing I was contracted for was finished.

      It was such a cool job and they offered me a permanent place. I just couldn’t feel behind every single day for the rest of my career until my system destroyed people’s lives.

      • peoplebeproblems@midwest.socialEnglish
        9·
        4 days ago

        I didn’t work on the FCC software, I wrote software to test the assembled FCC box, but the feeling was… Similar. I think it was a Moog product that went in an Embraer or the Chinese C919.

        I had 150+ connectors, and they had to provide me values to send to every one of them, and then what to measure on every single output to make sure that there were no shorts, no opens, and no damage to a single component inside of it.

        I had an interview to work on the platform of a weapon system, obviously would require clearance. I got the job. I went down to check out living possibilities, and while I was there, Saudis had bombed a bus full of kids. I figured out that I’d be working on and air to air missile, but the mere thought that I’d be attached to something delivering death sent me into a panick attack that forced me to decline the job. I now work on healthcare systems. It’s a fuckload nicer knowing I’m making people’s lives easier and and saving lives rather than risking them.

    • tacofox@lemm.ee
      4·
      4 days ago

      All roads lead to Microsoft 😬

      “Both first and business class seats were equipped with a Windows NT 4.0 based In-Flight Entertainment Network (IFEN) system with touchscreen in-seat video displays and magnetic card readers.[3] In the galley, a cabin file server served as a central hub for managing content, which facilitated movie downloads, stored flight and casino information, and collected credit card data transmitted from each seat.[3]: 43 “

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      4 days ago

      And the entertainment systems crash and bug out all the time so I sure hope the more important systems are developed more thoroughly lol

  • iamtherealwalrus@lemmy.world
    30·
    3 days ago

    Having worked in this industry for going on 25 years, I long ago learned that there are way too many incompetent programmers in the world working critical jobs. It’s best not to think about it.

    • oo1@lemmings.worldEnglish
      10·
      3 days ago

      Judge any service (and most other stuff) by its support, aftercare and how they handle complaints / fix problems.

      That’s worth more than flashy front end, marketing bs or even technical performance specs.

      • bluewing@lemm.ee
        2·
        2 days ago

        Yep. When buying a product, it ain’t about the packaging, color of the paint, or the sticker/badge hung on it. It’s all about the service when things go sideways. And at some point something will go wrong, it always does. That’s when you learn just how good or bad a company is.

  • jdeath@lemm.ee
    52·
    4 days ago

    i read that Boeing paid developers in India less than $5/hr for the 737 MAX software

    • MiDaBa@lemmy.ml
      47·
      4 days ago

      This is the type of peak capitalism that make me lose all faith in humanity. The fact American companies feel pressure to pay even less than the already poor salaries is testament to the need to burn this all to the ground.

    • mkwt@lemmy.world
      23·
      4 days ago

      As far as I know, the MAX software fully complied with its software requirements. The problem was crappy system requirements, and Boeing actively lied to their pilots to conceal that they added a brand new automatic flight control system that can push the elevators down independent of the autopilot and stick pusher.

      That last part is what sent people to jail.

    • endeavor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      I hope they pay air force one programmers 2 dollars an hour, engineers 3 dollars an hour and factory workers 20 cents an hour.

  • wieson@feddit.org
    19·
    3 days ago

    These things should never come down to the individual skill of the programmer. There should be systems and checks in place to assure the quality. And if the quality isn’t reached, the programmer needs enough time and support to reach them.

    But we all know, being thorough doesn’t pay.

  • Skunk@jlai.lu
    42·
    4 days ago

    Don’t worry OP, they let me be an air traffic controller and my best mate an airline pilot.

    Bad software or not, you’re fucked anyway.

  • tentaclius@lemm.ee
    13·
    3 days ago

    I’d say ‘Imposter Syndrome’ + ‘Past Job Position Trauma’. There should be good review process and good pipeline with automatic testing and static code analysis, it shouldn’t be a responsibility of a single person.

  • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
    18·
    4 days ago

    this makes me think of the dilbert where the lazy guy talks about reusing code from payroll on this project for airline software and warns his workmates to not fly on payday.

      • peoplebeproblems@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        Oh that’s neat. That makes me feel a lot better. I mean I get that the systems were probably embedded and that everything was defined, but it’s relieving to hear that a segmentation fault or dangling pointer would generally be avoided.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      8·
      4 days ago

      Ada is a language that leaves a lot of things “implementation dependent” as it’s not supposed to grant easy access to underlying data types like those you’ll find in C, or literally on the silicon. You’re supposed to be able to declare your own integer type of any size and the compiler is supposed to figure it out. If it chooses to use a native data type, then so be it.

      This doesn’t guarantee the correctness of the compiler nor the programmer who absolutely has to work with native types because it’s an embedded system though.

      This has ended in disaster at least once: https://itsfoss.com/a-floating-point-error-that-caused-a-damage-worth-half-a-billion/