> That is I believe Musk's premise with his rocketry division.
One hull loss per nineteen attempts is not an acceptable failure rate for "the airplane industry", is it? It's difficult for me to put into words the level of respect and admiration I have for the risk-averse, plodding, and methodical aerospace culture that has created modern aviation. (Seriously, have you ever considered the absolute miracle of engineering that is a modern jetliner?) To lump that profession under the same rubric of engineering as the one where a bunch of overcaffeinated "disruptors" write software to get people to click on ads seems... unjust, to put it mildly.
You can't compare a giant pipe bomb with passengers on one end to an airplane either, but I'm the one who opened that door without a suitable qualifier, so that's on me.
What I meant to convey is that I expect someone to do to commercial aviation what Musk is trying to do to rocketry, and what I expect that to look like is for more effort to be placed into reducing single points of failure by designing complementary systems instead of just putting three of everything on the vehicle and then adding two more layers of stuff to manage it. And also for them to act like progress in software development processes actually applies to them now instead of in thirty years. We got no end of grief for refusing to do pure waterfall, and they were conspicuously silent when we're were able to fix fundamental up front design flaws in 3-8 weeks, and without doing a reenactment of Macbeth starring William Shatner, set in a rehab clinic.
Then again, I expect something to happen to improve the caliber of software developers out there as well, so we'll see how that goes. Often when I expound on the qualities of my profession I am intentionally and consciously imagining that the 30% of my peers that are responsible for 70% of our problems either don't exist, or are off doing something that's not important.
One hull loss per nineteen attempts is not an acceptable failure rate for "the airplane industry", is it? It's difficult for me to put into words the level of respect and admiration I have for the risk-averse, plodding, and methodical aerospace culture that has created modern aviation. (Seriously, have you ever considered the absolute miracle of engineering that is a modern jetliner?) To lump that profession under the same rubric of engineering as the one where a bunch of overcaffeinated "disruptors" write software to get people to click on ads seems... unjust, to put it mildly.