Software bug fingered as cause of Aussie A330 plunge
In Die By Wire, I talk about the software and hardware vulnerablities inherent in fly-by-wire computer systems. In that book, the villain, through a series of corporate shells, buys a reliability testing company that services airliner computer systems. His aim: even if you can’t eliminate all the bugs (like the Aussie A330’s) you can exploit bugs that you do detect.
This Register article yesterday about a real near-disaster offers a look at the problem:
Software bug fingered as cause of Aussie A330 plunge:
“On 7 October 2008, the Australian-owned A330-303 aircraft was cruising at 37,000 feet when the autopilot disengaged and the aircraft rose, before plunging downwards sharply, injuring 110 of the aircraft’s 303 passengers and three-quarters of the cabin crew. Three minutes later the aircraft did it again, and the flight crew was bombarded with warnings from the instrumentation – almost all of them false.
“The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s (ATSB) final report found that one of the three air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs) installed on the A330-303 aircraft began to malfunction and went into failure mode before the incident.
“It then began feeding false information into the flight control systems, and the software algorithms designed to handle the information couldn’t cope, causing the erratic behavior.”
The bolding in the last paragraph is mine. If you knew of the vulnerability, you could make that happen on demand. Is that how Die By Wire’s villain did it? Is that really what happened to Air France 447?
And how could you do that in order to make 24 aircraft drop out of the sky at the same moment?
Those would be a spoilers, now wouldn’t they?
NOTE: The small excerpt, above, doesn’t do the full article justice.Read the rest.
