OPINION Section
Human beings and their machines find it hard to understand each other.
When congressional hearings were inaugurated, they were supposed to be information-seeking exercises. Not much information seeking went on at last week’s hearings on the Boeing 737 MAX. Senators gave speeches deploring plane crashes. Even when they asked questions, they seldom waited for answers. And if any legislation results, it will surely be written by staffers based on agendas long ago hashed out.
All in all, a display of institutional decadence not unlike the one that seems to have afflicted Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration in their implementation and approval of MCAS, the automatic software system blamed for two terrible crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
To the question of how such a system could find its way into a plane, the answer seems to be “by mistake.”
Excerpt from WSJ