What was the point of this article appearing in OO? It doesn't say much.

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.

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The article is obsolete.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.

I think the reason this old article has appeared here now is because it's one of the 'Best Blog' submissions for 2008.

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.

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.

Does anyone know how close the aircraft was to Exmouth Gulf ?
While my experience in this type of software is non-existant my
understanding and experience of data proving and tracing is such
that I would have thought that input data and processed output data
would have been logged.

The transmitters at Exmouth are very high powered but even so the
aircraft would have to be fairly close to get interference.
Devices external to the aircraft would be more susceptible than
anything inside the airframe.

This type of equipment is normally tested to ISO standards for
electromagnetic immunity for certain field strengths, but perhaps
only for frequencies used by the aircraft, not the Very Low
Frequency (VLF) used at Exmouth to talk to submarines.