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Volvo Has An Accident
……. but not the one you thought! Jim Reisert reported in Risks 28.66 ( Volvo horrible self-parking car accident) on a story in fusion.net on 2015-05-26 about a video of an accident with a Volvo car, apparently performing a demo in the Dominican Republic. The fusion.net story is by Kashmir Hill. Hill says “….[the video]…
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Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities in Commercial Aviation
The US Government Accounting Office has published a report into the US Federal Aviation Administration’s possible vulnerabilities to cyberattack. One of my respected colleagues, John Knight, was interviewed for it. (While I’m at it, let me recommend highly John’s inexpensive textbook Fundamentals of Dependable Computing for Software Engineers. It has been very well thought through…
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Thoughts After 4U 9525 / GWI18G
It is astonishing, maybe unique, about the Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 event how quickly it seems to have been explanatorily resolved. Egyptair Flight 990 (1999) took the “usual time” with the NTSB until it was resolved, and at the end certain participants in the investigation were still maintaining that technical problems with elevator/stabiliser had not…
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Fault, Failure, Reliability Definitions
OK, the discussion on these basic concepts continues (see the threads “Paper on Software Reliability and the Urn Model”, “Practical Statistical Evaluation of Critical Software”, and “Fault, Failure and Reliability Again (short)” in the System Safety List archive. This is a lengthy-ish note with a simple point: the notions of software failure, software fault, and…
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Fault, Failure, Reliability Again
On the System Safety Mailing list we have been discussing software reliability for just over a week. The occasion is that I and others are considering a replacement for the 18-year-old, incomplete, largely unhelpful and arguably misleading guide to the statistical evaluation of software in IEC 61508-7:2010 Annex D. Annex D is only four and…
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Security Vulnerabilities in Commercial-Aircraft SATCOM Kit
There has been some press in advance of last week’s Black Hat conference speaking of vulnerabilities in commercial-aircraft flight management systems and possible implications for the safety of flight, for example in a Reuters article by Jim Finkle from August 4. The article is technically fairly accurate on the claims made and the manufacturer’s response,…
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Don Hudson and PBL on the ITU’s proposal for real-time flight data transmission
The International Telecommunications Union has been conducting its four-yearly meeting. Its president has apparently promised everyone to make possible the real-time transmission of flight data from commercial transport aircraft in flight. This has been supported by the Malaysian delegate. All according to this news report: MH370: ITU Commits to Integrate Flight Data Recorders with Big…
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Hijacking a Boeing 777 Electronically
John Downer pointed me to an article in the Sunday Express, which appears to be one of their most-read: World’s first cyber hijack: was missing Malaysia Airlines plane hacked with mobile phone? by James Fielding and Stuart Winter. The answer is no. To see why, read on. The authors interviewed a Dr. Sally Leivesley, who…
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A Book on the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Accident
In August 2011, we held the 11th Bieleschweig Workshop on Systems Engineering. The theme was the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. We have just published a book on it. An Analytical Table of Contents may be found at the end of this note. I had convened a mailing list in the days…