Comment on Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find

• tankplanker@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The article is about right to repair, third party parts, and systems designed to block both of them, which I applied to an existing problem that applies to planes for certain and almost certainly other forms of public transport. Even a shit idea can be repurposed to improving the common good.

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  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    To be honest, while train safety is extremely important, aircraft safety is a whole ‘nother ballpark. Shit going very wrong on a train is bad, and may kill a lot of people. Shit going very wrong on a plane is catastrophic, and will almost certainly kill everyone on the plane.

    Source: I have worked in aerospace

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    • tankplanker@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      While parts don’t need to be made to the same standard nor do you need the same depth of safety components, I completely disagree that we should not be applying the same hygiene to part province and maintenance schedules. Obviously this should apply to track side components such as signalling, the track etc. as well, just like it should for the parts of an airport that a plane will interact with.

      Avoiding utter maintenance shit shows like the train crash in India that killed 300 people seem just as attractive to fix as they do with planes. Or the toxic spills that America has had that may not have killed as many people but are still expensive and hugely disrupting.

      Part of getting maintenance schedules followed properly and using quality parts is right to repair, part availability, and being able to prove part provenance and quality. A method to audit a part is essential for this, if we do whats needed by allowing 3rd parties to make parts to original spec for a reasonable cost, like we should to lower cost. Lower cost, more chance companies will avoid cutting corners, particularly if there is a proper audit trail for the part and you can actually prove that it is the *part *as well.

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      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        You’re not accounting for the substantial differences between the physical contexts in which trains and aircraft operate; the physics in play are wildly different, and have substantially different risk profiles due to that.

        If an engine breaks…

        • on a train: the train stops.
        • on a plane: depending on the situation, the plane has to make an emergency landing in the next case, and everyone dies in the worst case

        If a structural issue exists and begins to spread:

        • on a train: it can be catastrophic, but the situation will likely devolve in a more segmented fashion, simply because trains move far slower than planes do.
        • on a plane: it will almost certainly be catastrophic, and the situation commonly devolves rapidly, if not nearly instantaneously, because passengers jets normally operate around .85 Mach.

        More generally: the difference is that the “catastrophic spectrum” that can affect aircraft is much broader and has far more extreme consequences - as in, passenger survivability is often all or nothing, or at least very close to it.

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