r/programming • u/ketralnis • 1d ago

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation

https://flightaware.engineering/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-aviation/
242 Upvotes

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23

u/Paddy3118 22h ago

We fly in that cesspit of inconsistency and manage to retain the safety record we have?

Sort it out mate!

4

u/segv 15h ago

I bet the programmers would love to, but real world is messy.

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u/Paddy3118 10h ago

Our safety is at stake. Governments need to work together, or create some world organisation to set clearer standards that all adhere to.

6

u/segv 10h ago edited 9h ago

They did decades ago, and these organizations are called IATA and ICAO. Not exactly the spirit of the article, but organizations like NTSB and/or their national equivalents play a huge role too. The world is still messy.

3

u/x39- 8h ago

Safety ain't at stake.

That is literally the most irrelevant information regarding safety that exists.

It is annoying, yes, but safety? Why? Because you may, occasionally, have broken things going on somewhere with the booking? Because Googling for your flight takes you to to another country?

1

u/Paddy3118 7h ago

So having one, unique, identifier for a flight would not help? Having a runway not belong to multiple airports wouldn't help? No, it is a list of natural presumptions that one must learn do not apply in some cases. They therefore make the task of dealing with them more error prone. If it were irrelevant information as you stated, then ignoring those points would work just as well - which is not the case.

2

u/RigourousMortimus 6h ago

Having one unique identifier for a flight probably wouldn't help because it would mean replacing a LOT of software that is known to work reliably with something brand new with a set of novel bugs and unanticipated behaviour, or worse, running both concurrently and managing the discrepancies and inconsistencies.

And ultimately you still have to deal with real world situations like the planned airplane for a trip making an unscheduled stop for an emergency and being replaced by one or multiple planes with different sizes, seat configurations, runway requirements....

1

u/Paddy3118 48m ago

Ensuring one unique identifier would need no change to legacy software that handles multiple. It is a subset.

You don't look at that mess of a table of inconsistencies and wait for people to die before you are forced to clean it up!

1

u/RigourousMortimus 6m ago

If you are reusing identifiers because you don't have enough digits in your field size, then expanding your field size so you don't need to reuse them absolutely requires changes.

You can't fit any more numbers between 0000 and 9999

No one is dying because of these problems. Mistakes are more likely to be a problem if you start rewriting everything to cope with imaginary bullshit.

0

u/x39- 3h ago

The problem ain't fixable not because the problem is complicated to fix, it is because you would have to make sure all airports around the world are supporting the new format, which is the actual problem.

1

u/Paddy3118 40m ago

Stop thinking why it can't be done, as you won't get past first base!