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An Ethical Statement on Incidents
Donald Gotterbarn and Keith W. Miller wrote on a Software Engineering Code of Ethics in the June 2009 edition of IEEE Computer magazine. They illustrate the application of their principles with some case studies, including Case Study 2: Who Is In Control? They consider first the October 2008 Qantas accident, concerning which an interim factual…
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AF 447 ACARS: A Mistake with a Life of its Own
Here is yet another indication of how things can get a life of their own:- Soon after the France 2 program showing the ACARS transcript messages on 4 June, someone on the pilot’s forum PPRuNe typed them up, and posted them to imageshack. Now they apparently made it onto eurocockpit.com . The New York Times’s…
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AF 447 ACARS Messages: Reading Tea Leaves
A list of the 24 ACARS messages listed by Air France that were sent from AF 447 between 0210Z and 0214Z on 1 June, 2009, the last information received from the aircraft, was shown on the France 2 TV channel on Thursday June 4. This list, in which incomplete information was shown, was typed up…
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The Crash of Air France flight 447 on 1 June 2009: introduction
On the morning of June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Paris failed to make any contact with Air Traffic Control after about 0200Z (“Zulu” time is UTC, so two hours behind Paris time). The aircraft had been flying in the region of a series of significant convective…
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The crash of GOL 1907
Sometime round about 16:00 local time on Friday 29 September, an Embraer Legacy jet on a delivery flight on airway UZ 6 in the Mato Grosso of Brasil collided with an object which took away most of a winglet and damaged the empennage. At around the same time, GOL 1907, a B737-800 (or B738 for…