Under "wraps"? Seems odd....
I find it very strange that a judge is keeping the data recorder away from those would benefit from that information. Is this normal behavior in Spain?
Airbus warns of software bug in A400M transport planes
A software bug may have cause the May 9 crash that grounded Airbus' troubled A400M military transport aircraft. Airbus has sent an alert to customers instructing them to conduct “specific checks of the Electronic Control Units (ECU) on each of the aircraft's engines”. Spiegel reports that the bug caused three of the transport …
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Wednesday 20th May 2015 05:36 GMT bazza
Re: Under "wraps"? Seems odd....
Under the inquisitorial system of justice that they have in most of Europe it is up to the court to discover the facts. It is quite proper for the judge to keep the evidence confidential until the court is satisfied that it knows what the facts actually are. That means looking at all avenues of inquiry exhaustively prior to reaching an official conclusion.
You have to recognise that whatever the inquiry finds it is going to have a serious judicial impact on some individuals, if in fact there is anyone to blame. You cannot have half complete theories being espoused by the court because that would unfairly affect those who in the fullness of time would be shown to have no involvement.
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Wednesday 20th May 2015 06:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Under "wraps"? Seems odd....
Gollux,
The term is "Adversarial Law" or "Guilty until proven innocent". While the Church was a law unto itself and had it's fingers in the pie, the Secular System was a bit separate from the Inquisition.
The UK has an adversarial system of law. Countries like France, Spain have the Inquisitorial system of justice. It's very different to the system in the UK, and a whole lot cheaper.
If you want to know more I suggest you pop across the channel and break a shop window or something.
Or just try reading up before you post.
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Wednesday 20th May 2015 06:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Under "wraps"? Seems odd....
There's nothing "proper" about holding up a flight safety investigation. The only value of the flight recorders, either to the criminal investigation or to the rather more useful manufacturer's one, is the data they contain. There's no point in hanging onto the recorders without having the data downloaded, something the investigating judge certainly can't do anyway without outside help. If the judge wants to use the recorder as an evidential doorstop after the data's been downloaded then fine, but don't prevent the problem with the aircraft being identified and fixed. This may be the way things are done in Spain, but that doesn't mean it's sensible.
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Wednesday 20th May 2015 13:00 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Under "wraps"? Seems odd....
So where does the black box go ?
To Airbus - so they can prove that it wasn't their fault
The spanish air force, the spanish civil aviation authority.
The turkish, since it was their plane.
The airbus member country who wrote the software
Who decides if it was the software
Having a judge decide this after some deiberation seems a better idea than first to the site grabs it.
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Wednesday 20th May 2015 22:50 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: "The project ran late and over budget. "
>That could be the corporate motto of Airbus
Boeing's was not only late and overbudget but they deliberatly built the first aircraft with non-approved rivets in order to meet Wall St expectations. Then had to drill every single one out and replace it before they could start tests.
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Wednesday 20th May 2015 21:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It does have to suck
The point is that it really isn't down to one guy or gal to hack out some code and then go fly the plane. For safety-critical class A code like an engine controller (only nuclear power plant code has stricter controls) there is about 18 months of work to do before you even start coding just to establish the number and depth of reviews of the *requirements* then you do a whole bunch of functionality analysis and functional failure analysis to find where the deep bugs might be hiding and so the code for these functions is subjected to special scrutiny etc etc etc. tl;dr getting FADEC code wrong has nothing to do with your leets and everything to do with the surrounding quality control system so it is absolutely correct to say that this was a 'quality problem' The sad part is that although there is possibly a common-mode unintended failure buried here, they would probably have survived if they hadn't hit the pole.
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Friday 22nd May 2015 19:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hm.
Sounds like multiple survivable by themselves errors led to a fatal accident.
Since the text alludes to checking the engine ECUs, the implication is that either there is a customization that was not set up correctly, or that there is some manufacturing setting that wasn't set correctly (like, engine ECU still in mfg test mode allowing commands which are normally illegal to be accepted, or having the ECU spit out extra test data). If a particular test maneuver, say, sloshes the low fuel[1] a certain way for 3 of 4 engines the extra engine diagnostic data about fuel flow issues causes the master controller receiving said unexpected extra data to decide the engine is crackers and issues a DIE DIE DIE (or maybe just a benign on the ground...) reset command. At low altitude 3 suddenly dead engines is not so benign...
Of course, I just made all that up. It won't happen again whatever it is, because additional avionics code will be added to prevent such a thing. Next time it will be something different... Hopefully the accident report will be detailed enough to say exactly what the failure was.
[1] perhaps the fuel truck had a flat so they went up with marginal fuel. So 4 European testers die instead of a plane full of Turkish paratroopers.
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