Comment by joelthelion

Comment by joelthelion 4 days ago

16 replies

Do they really need to ground the entire fleet for that? One incident for ten thousand planes in the air for years. I'd think that giving airlines two months to fix it would be sufficient.

kijin 4 days ago

I imagine it could help with Airbus marketing.

"We take proactive measures, whereas our competitor only takes action after multiple fatal crashes!"

  • probably_wrong 4 days ago

    I know someone who is stranded in another continent thanks to this. Trust me, all the understanding I could have as a technical user has been offset by the MASSIVE pain in the ass that is rebooking an international flight. And non-technical users have heard "the plane will not travel because it requires a software update", which does not inspire confidence.

    As far as I'm concerned it has not helped with their marketing.

    • lxgr 3 days ago

      > "the plane will not travel because it requires a software update", which does not inspire confidence.

      It actually inspires a lot of confidence to people who can at least think economically, if not technically:

      Grounding thousands of planes is very expensive (passengers get cash for that in at least the EU, and sometimes more than the ticket cost!), so doing it both shows that it’s probably a serious issue and it’s being taken seriously.

      • probably_wrong 3 days ago

        First, I feel the implication that "if you aren't reassured is only because you're dumb" is unwarranted.

        With that out of the way, being expensive does not preclude shoddy work. At the end of the day, the only difference between "they are so concerned about security that they are willing to lose millions[1]" and "their process must be so bad that they have no other choice but to lose millions before their death trap cost them ten times that" is how good your previous perception of their airplanes is.

        I think that, had this exact same issue happened to Boeing, we would be having a very different conversation. As the current top-comment suggests, it would probably be less "these things happen" and more "they cheapened out on the ECC".

        [1] Disclaimer: I have no idea who loses money in this scenario, if it's also Airbus or if it's exclusively the airlines who bought them.

  • brabel 4 days ago

    Imagine an airplane crashed in these 2 months. I bet you would join the chorus and blame them for gross negligence.

    • kijin 4 days ago

      There's a huge difference between "manufacturer recommended updates, but airline waited until the last week to apply them" and "manufacturer didn't even acknowledge the issue" in terms of who the chorus is going to blame.

mrpippy 4 days ago

I don’t believe it’s been years, only the latest firmware version for the ELAC is affected. The fix is to downgrade (or replace hardware with a unit running earlier firmware)

jfoster 4 days ago

I wonder who eats the cost of this? I presume it's the airlines.

So the immediate cost to Airbus of grounding the fleet is quite low, whilst the downside of not grounding the fleet (risk of incident, lawsuits, reputation, etc.) could be substantial.

  • Havoc 4 days ago

    Yeah should be airlines

    It sounds like the fix is fairly quick so probably not as expensive as the max multi month groundings

    I doubt anyone is going to sue. Repairs etc are a part of life when owning aircraft. So as long as Airbus makes this happen fast and smooth they’re probably ok

f1shy 4 days ago

I would personally not want to seat in those planes in those 2 months.

  • upcoming-sesame 4 days ago

    nothing worse than rushing a fix in production - only to find out the fix has caused more damage than the original bug

refulgentis 4 days ago

Yeah, because the alternative is knowing you might kill people due to a mundane engineering known issue.

pyb 4 days ago

I get the feeling that they are doing this partly for marketing purposes.

Bud 4 days ago

From their viewpoint, you have to think about what happens if, after they became aware of this vulnerability, there was then a crash because they weren't prompt and aggressive enough in addressing it. That's the kind of thing that ruins your entire company forever.

  • Esophagus4 4 days ago

    Yep - Boeing is still dealing with it years later.

    (As they should - I’m still very mad at them.)