Comment by 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.
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.
> "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.