Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/08/737-ng.html
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Great, inflight DLC.
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Boeing, what the hell?!?
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After reading about all the issues with the construction and testing of the 737, this still isn’t the kind of problem I’d have expected. So weirdly specific, I was wondering if it wasn’t about some testing data that had accidentally made its way into release code, thereby corrupting something, but apparently it isn’t about the airports themselves, but weird interactions of systems triggered by certain lat/long values. The whistleblowers are right: Boeing really is so fucked.
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Of all the things to read while on final approach in a 737. Fortunately not at one of those airports, but still… (checking angle of runway…)
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How does the 737-800 incident have anything to do with this? The whistleblower issues I’ve heard haven’t had anything to do with the 737-800, just the 787 and the 737-MAX issues have no relation to the 737-800.
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I interpret the directive to mean that those seven airports happen to be the ones with 270 degree true heading runways, where said heading causes the screens to go blank.
But yeah, WTF, Boeing?
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There’s a guy in my complex whose truck has a, “If It’s Not Boeing, I’m Not Going!” sticker on it. I wonder if he still feels that way.
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Makes me wonder if they just transplanted MS Flight Simulator 2008 into the 737NG.
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A bit of a red herring isn’t it.
Sort of like a story I saw yesterday about the Ukrainian plane crash which mentioned that Iran had an aging airliner fleet - which had nothing to do with the crash as the plane was Ukrainian, not Iranian.
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This bug itself (presumably) didn’t cause the Tehran crash. However, it (the bug) is yet more evidence of shitty quality control at Boeing, in this case in the production of software for the 737-800 (among other models). It doesn’t seem extreme to speculate that some other bug, as yet undiscovered, could be to blame for the crash in Iran.
[Edited for clarity, hat-tip to @timmh]
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Until it’s clear what caused the crash, no it is not evidence of anything RE: Boeing and quality control.
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Sorry, I meant that the 270-degree bug was evidence, not the Tehran crash. Edited post to disambiguate.
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Maybe the airports didn’t pay for the software and Boeing is just protecting shareholder value? How else are major shareholders going to pay for private planes so they don’t have to fly on Boeing aircraft, have you heard those things are death traps!?
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I remember when Sweden was considering buying an attack helicopter, so the Americans sent one to a test range in northern Sweden where it was to show how accurate it was a firing. Every shot went wide by a mile. It turned out the designers had never considered that you might want to operate it at such a high latitude so there was some kind of overflow error in all calculations. Programming is hard.
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I was surprised that Wayne County OH’s airport was big enough to land a 737 at. I guess they cater to corporate jets frequently – who’da thunk?
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I don’t think they checked to see if the runway is big enough, it’s just every runway with the bad coordinate set plus the bad runway heading.
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Programming is easy. QA is hard.
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Please unplug your airport, rotate 5 degrees, and reinstall. Thank you.
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Good programing isn’t this fragile. If a program is badly written no amount of testing will fix it since you can’t test for every special case that is going to happen at some point.
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