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The Forum > Article Comments > The Qantas nosedive - what happened > Comments

The Qantas nosedive - what happened : Comments

By Robert Merkel, published 8/1/2009

Why did a Qantas Airbus A330 airliner suddenly dive a couple of hundred metres?

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What was the point of this article appearing in OO? It doesn't say much.
Posted by Sylvia Else, Thursday, 8 January 2009 1:16:09 PM
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Sylvia Else: "What was the point of this article appearing in OO? It doesn't say much."

To each their own Sylvia - I enjoyed it. True, it didn't say much - other than it was a failure in the plane and not a weather anomaly. That was news to me.
Posted by rstuart, Thursday, 8 January 2009 2:39:34 PM
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It might have been of interest when it was originally published. But since then, the ATSB has published their preliminary report:

http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2008/AAIR/pdf/AO2008070_prelim.pdf

The article is obsolete.

Sylvia.
Posted by Sylvia Else, Thursday, 8 January 2009 6:01:03 PM
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I think the reason this old article has appeared here now is because it's one of the 'Best Blog' submissions for 2008.
Posted by AdamD, Thursday, 8 January 2009 6:51:23 PM
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Sylvia Else: "It might have been of interest when it was originally published. But since then, the ATSB has published their preliminary report"

I still don't agree. The official report is a dense 29 page technical document. The article is a short easily digestible summary. If this short summary is a waste of time, then so is most mass media reporting on engineering and science.

Whats more, the article highlights that the failure of one of the three inertial guidance systems should not of caused the event, whereas in my quick read report I didn't seem them mention it. I presume that is because they don't have a clue as to what happen and the report avoids speculating on it, whereas the article doesn't. So it is not just a summary - it covers new ground.

Essentially, Robert is saying there is a software bug which has probably struck before. It has that managed to slip through one of the most rigours software development processes on the planet. I imagine (or at least I hope) Air Bus has made despite strenuous efforts to find the bug, but has so far failed. If it strikes when the plane is near the ground people will die. Given your background, I am surprised you don't find this interesting. I do.

Thanks for the link to the report. I have never seen a real "Aviation Occurrence Investigation" before, which made it interesting reading.
Posted by rstuart, Thursday, 8 January 2009 7:37:36 PM
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This comment adds to the blog post rather than commenting on it.

A Malaysian Airlines B777 suffered a similar upset to the Qantas Airbus on the route between Perth and Kuala Lumpur in August 2005. There has been speculation that radio signals from a nearby joint US-Australian military base had something to do with both events.

However the Australian Transport Safety Bureau is satisfied that the cause of the B777 incident was a latent software bug in the aircraft's air data inertial reference unit (ADIRU). The bug had existed from the time that B777s first entered service in 1995 but did not manifest itself until an unusual sequence of failures affected two of the aircraft's three accelerometers.

http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2005/AAIR/aair200503722.aspx

That does not prove that the military base had nothing to do with the Airbus incident, but does undermine the theory that if two similar incidents occurred near the base, it must have had something to do with them.
Posted by MikeM, Monday, 12 January 2009 8:03:18 PM
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