Originally Posted by
Mad (Flt) Scientist
It's two subtly but significantly different statements.
that attributed to Boeing - "pilots weren’t ever likely to encounter" sounds like the kind of wording used in failures assessment guidance. (I suspect if I dug deep enough i could find it verbatim in guidance somewhere) On the other hand, "it'll never happen" is not the kind of statement any certification engineer would ever be capable of or comfortable making, and I'm guessing it's a paraphrasing (with a dollop of simplification) of the former statement.
Fair enough. But if they actually did failure analysis and quantified failure rates properly, like they are supposed to, it would have been glaring obvious the "unintended activation" has a high occurrence rate, and a single point failure at that.