I was led recently to think of some of the main issues in safety engineering of systems with computer-based components, when they occurred in the course of a discussion on the University of York safety-critical systems mailing list (look for “Certification of Tools/Components” in the archive). Here are some of these issues and my views…
There are some significant issues which are clarified by the BEA’s preliminary factual report, issued at the beginning of July: specifically the uncertainties and certainties in the meaning and partial interpretation of the maintenance messages received by ACARS; the question of structural integrity; the attitude and flight path of the aircraft on impact with the…
It happened again! On 13 December 2008, a Boeing 767-39H suffered a tailstrike on takeoff at Manchester Airport. A tailstrike can occur on takeoff when the pilots pitch the nose of the aircraft too high in the air before it has lifted off the ground. This can occur when the aircraft is “rotated”, that is,…
Further to the Gotterbarn/Miller study of software engineering ethics in the June 2009 edition of IEEE Computer, and my letter to the editors which I published here on 27 June, Professors Gotterbarn and Miller have replied to my letter. Both letter and reply will appear in the August 2009 edition of IEEE Computer. Professors Gotterbarn…
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…
with Martyn Thomas, co-author. [A couple of weeks ago, Martyn Thomas and I were contacted by a journalist for the German weekly Der Spiegel. He asked me a question which I found hard to answer for non-specialists: what are “formal methods?” Here is the answer which Martyn and I supplied.] There has long been a…
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…
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…
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…
I recently looked through Nature’s List of Top 50 Science Blogs and ended up reading quite a lot of the Good Math, Bad Math Weblog of Mark Chu-Carroll, a computer scientist at a major industry research center who is enamoured of mathematics.The Science Top 50 Weblogs seems to be heavy on biology and the U.S.…