I found the original article. This is part 1........
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114895279859065931.html
http://64.226.131.145/discus/messages/1/2822.html?1149018014
The Wall Street Journal
Incidents Prompt New Scrutiny Of Airplane Software Glitches
As Programs Grow Complex, Bugs Are Hard to Detect; A Jet's Roller-Coaster Ride
Teaching Pilots to Get Control
By DANIEL MICHAELS and ANDY PASZTOR
May 30, 2006; Page A1
As a Malaysia Airlines jetliner cruised from Perth, Australia, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, one evening last August, it suddenly took on a mind of its own and zoomed 3,000 feet upward.
The captain disconnected the autopilot and pointed the Boeing 777's nose down to avoid stalling, but was jerked into a steep dive. He throttled back sharply on both engines, trying to slow the plane. Instead, the jet raced into another climb. The crew eventually regained control and manually flew their 177 passengers safely back to Australia.
Investigators quickly discovered the reason for the plane's roller-coaster ride 38,000 feet above the Indian Ocean. A defective software program had provided incorrect data about the aircraft's speed and acceleration, confusing flight computers. The computers had also failed, at first, to respond to the pilot's commands. Within weeks Boeing Co. warned airlines world-wide to install a fix provided by Honeywell International Inc., which makes the flight computers and supplied the faulty software.
Such glitches, while extremely rare, are emerging as a top safety challenge in the air. With well over five million lines of code used on the latest jetliners, versus fewer than a million on older planes, it's increasingly difficult to detect and fix embedded problems before they surprise pilots.
Plane makers are accustomed to testing metals and plastics under almost every conceivable kind of extreme stress, while software used on commercial aircraft is prepared and checked much more rigorously than applications developed for everyday uses. But it's impossible to run a big computer program through every scenario to detect the bugs that invariably crop up. And in airplanes, such vulnerability to undiscovered errors can lead to consequences far more dire than an email outage or spreadsheet error.
Now officials have begun re-examining flight data from past accidents and incidents, searching for ways in which bugs might have contributed to slip-ups or led to other problems. "It's our next big area of work," says Peggy Gilligan, a top safety official at the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington. She says industry and government experts recently "came to the realization that we haven't looked at this area" closely enough. Regulators also are studying how to improve detection of wayward software and train pilots better to handle crises involving computer breakdowns.
Serious software bugs such as those aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 124 haven't been blamed for any major commercial jet crash. Advances in electronics are a big reason air travel has become safer. But several incidents -- including one that caused a Virgin Atlantic plane to make an emergency landing in Amsterdam last year -- are ringing alarm bells.
"A total loss of flight control could be worse than a fire on board," says Robin McCall, a veteran Delta Air Lines captain who flew highly automated Boeing 767s before retiring last year.
Capt. McCall says automation failures can make it tough for pilots to revert to basic flight procedures and work around the problem. The Malaysia Airlines drama, he says, is "among the scariest scenarios in all of modern aviation, since the plane was out of control" for some 45 seconds, despite the crew's efforts.
Malaysia Airlines and Honeywell declined to comment on the incident because it remains under investigation. Its details are discussed in reports by Australia's aviation authority. Scott Pelton, Boeing's chief engineer for electronic systems, says the incident was "clearly unacceptable" and prompted swift remedial action.
In theory, most advanced jetliners can take off, climb, navigate along a prescribed route, descend to their destination and roll to a halt at the end of the runway -- all without human intervention.
Autopilot programs were first created to make planes fly more smoothly and reduce pilot distractions by taking over rote tasks. Today's software also handles many other vital aspects of flight, such as adjusting cabin air pressure, maximizing fuel efficiency and warning of impending mechanical breakdowns or collision threats.
Advances planned for the Airbus A380 superjumbo jet, due to start passenger service later this year, and Boeing's long-range 787 Dreamliner, due in 2008, will take automation to new heights. Instead of independent hardware and software systems for each task, the new jets will save weight by relying on redundant central computers to run the whole plane. The systems will have safeguards to prevent programs from interfering with and confusing each other. For example, if speed readings from sensors differ widely, the computers are designed to disregard the most extreme measurement and try to figure out which reading is correct.
Safety professionals agree that steady progress in onboard computing is a major reason accident rates for jetliners have declined significantly in the U.S. and much of Europe over the past two decades. In North America, there were 1.3 crashes per million departures in the late 1980s. By 2004 and 2005, the average figure was about 0.4, meaning the chance a plane now taking off will crash is less than one in two million.
Nonetheless, the design of computer systems intended to eliminate cockpit mistakes carry their own hidden risks of human error. In February 2005, multiple computers meant to back each other up mistakenly cut the flow of fuel to two of the four engines on a packed Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340 headed from Hong Kong to London. The crew made an emergency landing at Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam. British investigators have recommended design changes, including better warnings on fuel levels. Virgin Atlantic says it is cooperating with the investigation and the safety of the passengers was never threatened.
Last October, a 90-second computer hiccup aboard a British Airways Airbus A319 on a night flight from London to Budapest temporarily shut off nearly all the cockpit lights and electronic displays, along with radios and autopilot systems. British investigators say they have unearthed four similar cases on Airbus jets.
A British Airways spokesman says the airline worked with Airbus to diagnose the problem but they were unable to replicate the glitch. Airbus declines to comment on the two incidents because they remain under investigation. Airbus is 80%-owned by European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co. and 20%-owned by Britain's BAE Systems PLC.
During a test flight of a new jetliner made by Brazilian plane manufacturer Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica SA, or Embraer, the cockpit screens went black for a minute because of a software glitch. The FAA has since ordered programming and operational changes to the planes. Embraer says it has fixed the problems. Similar computer malfunctions have caused all cockpit screens to flicker or go dark momentarily in some smaller jets used by business executives. Regulators and manufacturers are working to prevent the same type of glitches on other high-end corporate aircraft.
The recent focus on computer problems partly reflects success in mitigating the more traditional dangers of flying such as pilot error, engine failure and bad weather. To keep pilots fresh, airlines have limited the number of hours they can work. Radar maps the precise location and intensity of storms.
Mechanical components such as jet engines are just as complex in their own way as computers. But aviation engineers now have an exhaustive understanding of the physical properties of metals, plastics and other materials and they know how to test them together as a system. That helps the industry produce parts that can handle the stresses of wind, turbulence and landing. Such parts almost never fail so long as they're properly maintained and operated.
In designing the superjumbo A380, Airbus engineers across Europe spent months bending and banging physical components of the aircraft to replicate the stresses of flying and landing. Ultimately they broke the parts, determining the maximum load the plane could handle. Engineers used that information to set operating limits such as top speed.
However, engineers can't predict as easily what kind of stresses might cause a computer program to go haywire. "Software is different," says Gérard Ladier, the senior manager of software engineering at Airbus.
Airbus has put huge effort into vetting the electronics, or avionics, of the new plane, which is the largest passenger jet ever built. At Airbus's headquarters in Toulouse, France, the guts of the A380 -- a collection of wires, pipes and motors -- lie in a gymnasium-sized room like a dissected robot. For two years before the jet's first flight in April 2005, engineers used this "iron bird" to check how their computers controlled the plane's mechanical systems.
Specialists say the biggest problems in aviation software don't stem from bugs in the code of a single program but rather from the interaction between two different parts of a plane's computer system. In extreme cases, foul-ups can lead to sudden loss of control, sometimes not showing up until years after aircraft are introduced into service.
Continued in Part 2
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114895279859065931.html
http://64.226.131.145/discus/messages/1/2822.html?1149018014
The Wall Street Journal
Incidents Prompt New Scrutiny Of Airplane Software Glitches
As Programs Grow Complex, Bugs Are Hard to Detect; A Jet's Roller-Coaster Ride
Teaching Pilots to Get Control
By DANIEL MICHAELS and ANDY PASZTOR
May 30, 2006; Page A1
As a Malaysia Airlines jetliner cruised from Perth, Australia, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, one evening last August, it suddenly took on a mind of its own and zoomed 3,000 feet upward.
The captain disconnected the autopilot and pointed the Boeing 777's nose down to avoid stalling, but was jerked into a steep dive. He throttled back sharply on both engines, trying to slow the plane. Instead, the jet raced into another climb. The crew eventually regained control and manually flew their 177 passengers safely back to Australia.
Investigators quickly discovered the reason for the plane's roller-coaster ride 38,000 feet above the Indian Ocean. A defective software program had provided incorrect data about the aircraft's speed and acceleration, confusing flight computers. The computers had also failed, at first, to respond to the pilot's commands. Within weeks Boeing Co. warned airlines world-wide to install a fix provided by Honeywell International Inc., which makes the flight computers and supplied the faulty software.
Such glitches, while extremely rare, are emerging as a top safety challenge in the air. With well over five million lines of code used on the latest jetliners, versus fewer than a million on older planes, it's increasingly difficult to detect and fix embedded problems before they surprise pilots.
Plane makers are accustomed to testing metals and plastics under almost every conceivable kind of extreme stress, while software used on commercial aircraft is prepared and checked much more rigorously than applications developed for everyday uses. But it's impossible to run a big computer program through every scenario to detect the bugs that invariably crop up. And in airplanes, such vulnerability to undiscovered errors can lead to consequences far more dire than an email outage or spreadsheet error.
Now officials have begun re-examining flight data from past accidents and incidents, searching for ways in which bugs might have contributed to slip-ups or led to other problems. "It's our next big area of work," says Peggy Gilligan, a top safety official at the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington. She says industry and government experts recently "came to the realization that we haven't looked at this area" closely enough. Regulators also are studying how to improve detection of wayward software and train pilots better to handle crises involving computer breakdowns.
Serious software bugs such as those aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 124 haven't been blamed for any major commercial jet crash. Advances in electronics are a big reason air travel has become safer. But several incidents -- including one that caused a Virgin Atlantic plane to make an emergency landing in Amsterdam last year -- are ringing alarm bells.
"A total loss of flight control could be worse than a fire on board," says Robin McCall, a veteran Delta Air Lines captain who flew highly automated Boeing 767s before retiring last year.
Capt. McCall says automation failures can make it tough for pilots to revert to basic flight procedures and work around the problem. The Malaysia Airlines drama, he says, is "among the scariest scenarios in all of modern aviation, since the plane was out of control" for some 45 seconds, despite the crew's efforts.
Malaysia Airlines and Honeywell declined to comment on the incident because it remains under investigation. Its details are discussed in reports by Australia's aviation authority. Scott Pelton, Boeing's chief engineer for electronic systems, says the incident was "clearly unacceptable" and prompted swift remedial action.
In theory, most advanced jetliners can take off, climb, navigate along a prescribed route, descend to their destination and roll to a halt at the end of the runway -- all without human intervention.
Autopilot programs were first created to make planes fly more smoothly and reduce pilot distractions by taking over rote tasks. Today's software also handles many other vital aspects of flight, such as adjusting cabin air pressure, maximizing fuel efficiency and warning of impending mechanical breakdowns or collision threats.
Advances planned for the Airbus A380 superjumbo jet, due to start passenger service later this year, and Boeing's long-range 787 Dreamliner, due in 2008, will take automation to new heights. Instead of independent hardware and software systems for each task, the new jets will save weight by relying on redundant central computers to run the whole plane. The systems will have safeguards to prevent programs from interfering with and confusing each other. For example, if speed readings from sensors differ widely, the computers are designed to disregard the most extreme measurement and try to figure out which reading is correct.
Safety professionals agree that steady progress in onboard computing is a major reason accident rates for jetliners have declined significantly in the U.S. and much of Europe over the past two decades. In North America, there were 1.3 crashes per million departures in the late 1980s. By 2004 and 2005, the average figure was about 0.4, meaning the chance a plane now taking off will crash is less than one in two million.
Nonetheless, the design of computer systems intended to eliminate cockpit mistakes carry their own hidden risks of human error. In February 2005, multiple computers meant to back each other up mistakenly cut the flow of fuel to two of the four engines on a packed Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340 headed from Hong Kong to London. The crew made an emergency landing at Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam. British investigators have recommended design changes, including better warnings on fuel levels. Virgin Atlantic says it is cooperating with the investigation and the safety of the passengers was never threatened.
Last October, a 90-second computer hiccup aboard a British Airways Airbus A319 on a night flight from London to Budapest temporarily shut off nearly all the cockpit lights and electronic displays, along with radios and autopilot systems. British investigators say they have unearthed four similar cases on Airbus jets.
A British Airways spokesman says the airline worked with Airbus to diagnose the problem but they were unable to replicate the glitch. Airbus declines to comment on the two incidents because they remain under investigation. Airbus is 80%-owned by European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co. and 20%-owned by Britain's BAE Systems PLC.
During a test flight of a new jetliner made by Brazilian plane manufacturer Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica SA, or Embraer, the cockpit screens went black for a minute because of a software glitch. The FAA has since ordered programming and operational changes to the planes. Embraer says it has fixed the problems. Similar computer malfunctions have caused all cockpit screens to flicker or go dark momentarily in some smaller jets used by business executives. Regulators and manufacturers are working to prevent the same type of glitches on other high-end corporate aircraft.
The recent focus on computer problems partly reflects success in mitigating the more traditional dangers of flying such as pilot error, engine failure and bad weather. To keep pilots fresh, airlines have limited the number of hours they can work. Radar maps the precise location and intensity of storms.
Mechanical components such as jet engines are just as complex in their own way as computers. But aviation engineers now have an exhaustive understanding of the physical properties of metals, plastics and other materials and they know how to test them together as a system. That helps the industry produce parts that can handle the stresses of wind, turbulence and landing. Such parts almost never fail so long as they're properly maintained and operated.
In designing the superjumbo A380, Airbus engineers across Europe spent months bending and banging physical components of the aircraft to replicate the stresses of flying and landing. Ultimately they broke the parts, determining the maximum load the plane could handle. Engineers used that information to set operating limits such as top speed.
However, engineers can't predict as easily what kind of stresses might cause a computer program to go haywire. "Software is different," says Gérard Ladier, the senior manager of software engineering at Airbus.
Airbus has put huge effort into vetting the electronics, or avionics, of the new plane, which is the largest passenger jet ever built. At Airbus's headquarters in Toulouse, France, the guts of the A380 -- a collection of wires, pipes and motors -- lie in a gymnasium-sized room like a dissected robot. For two years before the jet's first flight in April 2005, engineers used this "iron bird" to check how their computers controlled the plane's mechanical systems.
Specialists say the biggest problems in aviation software don't stem from bugs in the code of a single program but rather from the interaction between two different parts of a plane's computer system. In extreme cases, foul-ups can lead to sudden loss of control, sometimes not showing up until years after aircraft are introduced into service.
Continued in Part 2
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