In 1978 I was hired by an aerospace company that manufactured the cockpit voice recorder. A critical piece of equipment for a commercial jet. The final words of the cabin crew before the uncontrollable plane crashes. A helpful piece of information in determining the cause of the crash providing the struggling pilots give details.
Recently, there have been two crashes of one of Boeing's newest planes the 737 Max. First released in 2016. Initial reports all seem to point to a flight control problem. Apparently if the computer software feel the plane is going into a stall it pitches the nose down. Pilots aren't made aware of the software for the flight controls so if the nose suddenly does pitch down it leads to confusion in the cockpit. How long can you be confused before it crashes? Not long. Especially if you've just taken off.
So an early assumption is the cause of the crash has to do with software code. Can they simply dump the code and update current code? Probably not that easy. Who wrote the code? Software engineers hired by Boeing wrote the code--engineers in India.
Yesterday IBM chief Ginni Rometty said that these software engineers aren't even employable.
There's a held belief by some that India is handing out engineering degrees like they're baseball trading cards. Degrees that don't have much value in India but can get you a very high paying job in the United States.
It was good enough to fool Bill Gates and he pitched it to the United States government arguing if he's not allowed to hire thousands of foreign software engineers a Microsoft will be built in India and the US will fall vastly behind in the computer race. What keeps them from building one anyway? Don't they already have their own Microsoft? Are we to believe that the best and brightest students graduating in universities in India only want jobs outside of their own country? If the schools are so great why aren't Americans opting out of Yale, Harvard and other major universities to go to school in India? Perhaps they are. An interesting Google search of which has an Indian CEO flips the question of how many american's go to universities in India to how many Indians are at american universities. The search indicates their once treasured education system has been replaced by the United States were it is at a record high. What happened? Perhaps it never was any good. When you graduate with an engineering degree from one country and leave to work in another country isn't there some kind of test given to show competence especially when writing code for flight controls on a commercial jet? If my computer crashes it doesn't kill me.
In 2001 they were warned.
It was ignored and now we have planes falling out of the sky. Here an Indian claiming to be an engineer discusses Indian beliefs and talents. A host of grammatical errors but he gets a pass on that--english is a second language, but no pass for ignoring auto-correct on the word technology. When US companies see these types of mistakes on resumes applying for engineering positions due they ignore them?
Yes and we now have planes falling out of the sky with people in them.
Update: Boeing has a fix. Do you feel comfortable flying on this plane? How many simulated hours was conducted? Why not release that data?
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