cwizou
5 hours ago
Same thing happened to British Airways a few years ago on a 787, a misplaced security pin that was inserted in the wrong place during a maintenance operation. There are two very similar holes next to one another that can receive the pin, there's a picture at the bottom here : https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/318989
Wondering if the same mishap is behind it again.
wvbdmp
5 hours ago
Yikes, mojibake in 2021.
edit: actually, how did that happen? The apostrophes show up correctly, they’re just all preceded by a  that doesn’t seem to represent anything?
layer8
4 hours ago
The page is declared as ISO 8859-1, but the actual bytes of the text appear to be UTF-8. In UTF-8, characters from U+0080 to U+00AF happen to be encoded as C2 <codepoint value>. For example, U+0092 is encoded as C2 92.
C2 in ISO 8859-1 is ””. U+0092 is the control code Private Use 2 in Unicode, and 92 is the same in ISO 8859-1. However, the standard Western Windows code page 1252 extends ISO 8859-1 by assigning “’” (right single quotation mark) to 92.
HTML5/WHATWG requires an ISO 8859-1 charset declaration to be interpreted as Windows-1252 (https://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-character-encodin...), hence the displayed result is “Â’”.
The original Windows-1252 content must have previously been converted to UTF-8 under the assumption that the source is ISO 8859-1, i.e. mapping 92 to U+0092 (Private Use 2) instead of to U+2019 (Right Single Quotation Mark). The resulting UTF-8 encoding was placed in the web page, which however is declared as ISO 8859-1.
wvbdmp
4 hours ago
Delicious, thank you!
layer8
4 hours ago
I edited my post after verifying the actual bytes, it turned out to be slightly more complicated.
well_actulily
4 hours ago
The double-encoding path gets you there too: the original UTF-8 \xE2 \x80 \x99 mis-decoded as iso-8859-1 or Windows-1252 and saved back as UTF-8 gives \xC3 \xA2 \xC2 \x80 \xC2 \x99, which in Windows-1252 renders as ’. A WYSIWYG cleanup replacing that mojibake with the Windows-1252 ' (byte 0x92) and saving back as UTF-8 gets you to \xC2 \x92 on disk.
Edit: Although maybe that's not the most parsimonious explanation.
layer8
2 hours ago
In my post the sequence is:
1. Mis-transcode Windows-1252 as ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8.
2. Mis-decode UTF-8 as Windows-1252.
root-parent
4 hours ago
this one does g11n....
netsharc
4 hours ago
They're probably Microsoft's "Smart Quotes", which are Unicode. They were presumably stored in UTF-8 but retrieved as ASCII (or ISO-8859-1).
stefan_
5 hours ago
The report on that incident says there was a hardware modification to make this impossible, to be incorporated before Jan 2023.
(It also says this happened to Boeing in 2018 and they ignored it, of course)
cwizou
4 hours ago
I missed that part, and since it's a newly delivered plane (this January), it's safe to assume the mitigation was in place. Preliminary report will be interesting here.
dheera
3 hours ago
Wonder why they don't just grab a huge permanent Sharpie and write in huge letters "Do not insert pin here" on one hole and "Insert pin here" on the other hole.
I'm actually serious, it seems to me they resist these kind of short-term helpers that would save lots of injuries.
stefan_
3 hours ago
I think the report says they just put a little cover on the hole where the pin shouldn't go (but can).
dheera
3 hours ago
Sure, but they probably took 3 years to have a design review, an executive review, some firings and layoffs, re-hire, orientation, a sprint planning meeting, a sprint retro, a post mortem, an OKR meeting, a KPI meeting, an all-hands, and then the cover probably got stuck in customs with tariffs, and then the tolerances probably weren't correct.
Meanwhile the sharpie would take 1 minute.
netsharc
4 hours ago
The aircraft is 1 year old and was delivered in January...
But, fucking hell, apparently Boeing "engineers" are so dumb they never learned about Murphy's law.
866-RON-0-FEZ
3 hours ago
I bet you would blame the automotive engineers too after reversing your car through the garage door.
netsharc
34 minutes ago
Grandparent post:
> There are two very similar holes next to one another that can receive the pin, there's a picture at the bottom here : https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/318989
> Wondering if the same mishap is behind it again.
I'm commenting on the genius of this design. Even if yesterday's accident isn't due to this design, how dumb can you be to design something like that, it's what Murphy's Law says to not do.
crote
2 hours ago
You mean like the death of Anton Yelchin, where poor gearshift design made it incredibly easy to confuse whether the car was in gear or in park?
Yeah, that is indeed primarily on the engineers.