Tuesday, March 12, 2024 5:06 PM ET
The Alaska Airlines plane that lost a door panel midflight had been scheduled for maintenance that same day to address a potential problem.
The airline chose to keep the plane, a Boeing 737 Max 9, in service for a day after its engineers called for a rigorous maintenance check. #AlaskaAirlines#Airlines#transportation#NTSB#FAA#Boeing
An advisory light on the Alaska Airlines plane that lost a piece of its fuselage last week had come on during previous flights, preventing the aircraft from being used on long flights over water, the National Transportation Safety Board said.
"Tesla .. recalling .. over 2m vehicles in .. United States fitted with its Autopilot advanced driver-assistance system to install new safeguards, .. system was open to “foreseeable misuse”.
.. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been investigating the electric automaker ..
.. update to 2.03m Model S, X, 3 and Y vehicles .. dating back to .. 2012 model year,.."
Let's talk about #Mercedes vehicles equipped with #DrivePilot a bit - a Level 3-capable vehicle that has been recently "approved" in a handful of US states.
This article almost entirely focuses on the legal dynamics of consumer liability should this vehicle create a direct (or, presumably, an indirect) incident.
But, as always, I want to talk about what I feel are the #SystemsSafety realities at work here and the many foot-guns that are associated with that.
Now, you, as the human driver are also effectively at the mercy of #Mercedes!
The laws on the books do not matter.
And the considerable "friction" of pursuing an open-ended legal claim against Mercedes' data advantages will always work against you.
The #NTSB, the US's independent transportation safety investigator, foresaw this asymmetric data relationship as far back as 2016 - and, naturally, the US's hapless auto safety regulator, the #NHTSA, simply ignored it.
Call me old-fashioned, but if a car kills people at ten times the rate of other cars,
the company covers up the data,
and the CEO lies to the public and says the cars are safer…
@protecttruth not just that, I'm flabberghasted that safety boards like #NTSB & #KBA don't immediately revoke type regidtrations and forcibly remove said vehicles from traffic.
Because we do that for far less direct issues (i.e. fraudulent emissions)...
After the total vacuum of the #Trump Administration, though, and given the unique changes in the #automotive technology landscape... I feel strongly we needed a "war time" secretary.
Someone like (current #NTSB Chair) Jennifer Homendy that understands the systems safety issues and can work the politics if need be.
Honestly, I would have settled with any former NTSB chairperson being tapped for the #NHTSA leadership - even acting leadership.
An interesting article here by @mimsical and I would recommend reading it.
I think it is a reasonable take on how, essentially, the regulatory landscape will look in the US and perhaps elsewhere.
That said, I have some notes.
Not so much on the article itself... but on my favorite punching bag, the #NHTSA.
For those that do not know, the NHTSA is the unserious, disinterested and effectively theoretical regulator in the US for vehicle and roadway safety. 🧵
Regulators should oversee and scrutinize internal verification/validation processes and the fitness of identified/categorized failure modes. Processes should be in focus, not endpoints; and
Regulators should take that, combined with input from #NTSB safety investigations of incidents when they occur, and continuously set a standard "floor" that all automated driving systems (even those already in service) must adhere to.
Here we have another #Tesla#FSDBeta clip showing some highly-questionable automated vehicle behavior (the automated vehicle proceeds through a marked crosswalk where a pedestrian has already entered).
Let's put our #SystemsSafety caps on and take a look here...