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Old 7th Nov 2018, 14:41
  #739 (permalink)  
Water pilot
 
Join Date: Mar 2015
Location: Washington state
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Please remember this if you are one of the many fine Men and Women whom I sometimes trust with my life. A failure in a new plane is an even more serious matter than a failure in an old one, and you should refuse to fly it until the flaw with the plane -- and how confident you are that they have really discovered the true flaw --- is explained to your satisfaction. This is true of any complex system; each successful "flight" is a proof that there isn't a large underlying flaw in the construction. A 30-year-old house that shows drywall cracking and uneven floors is a far different matter than a one-month-old house with exactly the same symptoms to the same degree. There is a lot of stuff on a plane that will never go wrong if it was initially assembled correctly, so there really are not procedures to deal with an incorrect assembly.
Unless you always fly by hand, a programmer could design avionics that could kill the best of you. Obviously the engineers try very hard to keep people alive rather than kill them, but there is this guy called "Murphy" lurking in the background. One person in South Carolina has a bad day and puts the blue wire in the red slot or maybe a knife slips and "whew! It looks good, I don't have to redo that entire bundle" and the air gap between the wires is large enough that it doesn't cause a short on the dry day that the plane was tested...
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