With all due respect, this sounds too much like the kind of armchair quarterbacking that routinely appears on HN when avionics/politics/astronomy is mentioned, where a lone programmer feels competent enough to criticize an industry for missing "something obvious".
I mean, this particular change might have saved the particular 737, but I'd rather hear it from someone who actually knows how 737s fly.
I too have hundreds of flights and am also a programmer, but I would not assume having both skills would make you anything more then an armchair quarterback. If you have not written code that runs planes, what knowledge are you basing your idea off of. IMO.
i too also play games, but i wouldn't assume to tell a game developer how to write their code.
I agree - being a pilot and a programmer is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being able to diagnose and solve an issue in a system as complex as a modern airliner. In fact I don't think any individual is capable of doing so on their own; maybe the sole exception being someone like the engineering lead of avionics for the 737 Max, who is probably not a pilot, and probably only a programmer in so far as it was a component of their engineering education.
Honest question, is his experience in small aircraft applicable at all to jetliners? How much carryover, beyond core theory of flight dynamics, is there from piloting a single prop to an Airbus or even a regional jet?
The thermometer sensor and circuitry might be perfectly ok, still the 452 number might be a single digit gone bonkers in the panel, so that data being transmitted (maybe also recorded?) is ok while the readout is plain wrong. A human acting according data being shown there might react very differently from someone reading the temperatures log. Sometimes software problems can be awfully subtle.
Digital thermometers usually have triple digits to be able to display numbers in the low 100's. I could see one of them failing in a weird way and displaying 452.
I was as confused as the other commentators by this post until I realized that fixermark is thinking of analog thermometers with a physical dial, while we (and probably the author as well) are envisioning electronic thermometers with digital displays.
Philip Greenspun is, in fact a programmer. He's probably best known in these circles for the quote "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
It is possible to be both a pilot and a programmer.
I agree that we frequently see this on HN in regards to aviation. However, I don;t think it applies to Greenspun. He's a knowledgeable and active pilot himself.
Lots of people are, that doesn't mean they aren't armchair quarterbacking. I know how to fly airplanes and helicopters, does that make me an expert on the flight dynamics of 737 MAX?
That still doesn't mean he knows anything about writing code for flight control systems in commercial environments. Maybe he's written some toy code in MATLAB demonstrating some things, that's never undergone testing on a real airframe.
Are there any airliners for which a sustained 60-70 degree angle of attack over a span of several minutes is not overwhelmingly likely due to sensor failure?
Even there though, the fact that the Pats scout team ran that exact play twice in practice with the backup nickelback in was something that the coach perhaps could not have anticipated?
Any result other than an INT means Lynch still has a chance to run.
This type of elitism has no real place in hopefully constructive conversation.
I'm not going to ignore a well thought out point because someone doesn't have a PhD in the exact question under rumination.
And "armchair quarterbacking" tends to translate to "Request For Comment" in my book. I.e. a coming together of disparate ideas and areas of expertise to more fully render the extent of a problem.
This seems equivalent to "it is just a button, how hard can it be?" People outside of software rarely see the complexity they are suggesting or asking for.
Philip Greenspun is, in fact a pilot. He is not a 737 pilot, but probably has a better idea of how a 737 works than the average HN armchair quarterback.
I mean, this particular change might have saved the particular 737, but I'd rather hear it from someone who actually knows how 737s fly.