Via @mountain_ghosts via The Register
“You have no reason to be scared of flying, they take better care of their planes and have more safety checks than driving a car.”
The plane:
Wasn’t there a car (I think it was a jeep cherokee) a few years ago where the CANBUS could get hacked via bluetooth and they were able to fuck with the brakes?
I also remember a GM scandal maybe a decade or two ago where the key could just fall out of the ignition and kill your car while you were driving
Even farther back there was that cool thing with the ford pinto where the gas tank would explode in a rear end collision and cook you alive
Are airplanes really on continiously for 51 days? Sounds pretty impressive to be honest
Typically yes. Usually for faster turn around times. When they pull into a terminal ground power is attached so they don’t need to restart the computers and realign navigation systems during the day. At night when nobody is flying there really isn’t a reason to go fully cold.
One of the reason planes and vehicles in general are so reliable and safe is because all of the components are supposed to be rigorously tested until all failure modes can be accounted for and work around a found.
Now Boeing has had some oopsies with their angle of attack indicators back in ~2016, but those were new parts that’s clearly didn’t get tested enough.
This computer is likely an old design and it’s kept that way because we know how it fails, can predict those failures and know how to respond to them. Switching to a newer flight computer with a 64bit architecture would allow for storage of longer numbers, but it would also mean that every line of every bit of software that touches that computer would have to be gone over and tested with a fine toothed comb before any plane with the new computer would be allowed to fly again.
It’s much cheaper and safer to use an already known design and just work within its limits.
A part of me just wants to think “Boeing A Big Evil Corpo Trying To Save Costs” ☹️
But then there are genuine cases that flip this thinking on its head, like the ISS and its increased resistance to bit flips from solar flares, partially due to the larger electronics manufacturing techniques at the time it was created (tried to find my source for this but couldn’t)