Friday, June 5, 2020

Bombardier Temperature Correction Bug

Gareth Corfield (via Hacker News):

The bug, discovered on Bombardier CRJ-200 aircraft fitted with Rockwell Collins Aerospace-made flight management systems (FMSes), led to airliners trying to follow certain missed approaches turning right instead of left – or vice versa.

[…]

Both companies disagreed with the FAA’s directive when it was in draft format, arguing that a software fix would be easier to accomplish than banning the use of the automatic calculator.

[…]

Bugs in flight control software are rare, though not unknown. Most bugs in airliners tend to be unforeseen memory overflows, as both Airbus and Boeing have discovered over the years. A design formerly owned by Bombardier, the Airbus A220 (nee Bombardier C-series) suffered from software-induced problems with its engines last year, while the Boeing 737 was discovered to have a rare bug that completely blanked all cockpit displays if pilots tried to land on one of seven specific runways in the world.

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