Originally Posted by
Uplinker
In other areas of industry, there are arms manufacturers, who make machines and devices specifically designed to kill people. With your logic, nobody would manufacture arms, because that would be "stupid", but sadly, here we are.
Actually, arms serve a "higher" goal, even for the dictators, who want to expand their territory (Hitler, Putin, Xi).
Originally Posted by
Uplinker
.....
A software programmer might not have any idea about how aircraft fly, or what a pilot might or might not do with an aircraft. They might just be given a brief that, (in very simple terms); in situation X; if Y happens, the result needs to be Z.
That's not really how it works with software development. A proper software development gradually goes in steps from application experts to the factual coders. All guided/driven by a huge amount of documents in stepwise refinement/detailing, with continuous backtracking to correct on errors at the more abstract levels.
Originally Posted by
Uplinker
A staff programmer with aviation experience and knowledge of aircraft failure modes etc, might possibly raise concerns or even objections, but they would be told by their bosses that this is what we want. Or maybe they were convinced by the competent pilot argument. But even then; they would not necessarily know that MCAS was not going to be even mentioned in the FCOM.
What Boeing did was compartmentalize the whole MAX development, where the software got spec'd and subcontracted to India, implemented (probably some "easy" updates on the original version) by engineers without suitable aviation knowledge, "just a programming job", black box programming, paid the absolute minimum, etc. The less interaction there is in the whole development chain, the cheaper it is, though also the fewer chances there are, fundamental functional issues are detected along the way. Which happened.