This is a software issue. There's no two ways about it. | by Tom Ritchford | Medium

Designers of systems both in aviation and elsewhere can also learn something from this accident. There was a critical disconnect between the objectives for which the FMS was designed and the objectives for which pilots used it, due to a pervasive lack of information about how the system worked. It is too easy to assume that the end user will intuitively understand the system’s limitations. In this case, Airbus’s official documentation did include a series of leads which would bring a rea…
Running on Empty: The crash of Hapag-Lloyd flight 3378
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Admiral Cloudberg
Tom Ritchford
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1 min read·
Sep 13, 2020
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This is a software issue. There's no two ways about it.
EITHER the FMS should have settings for uncommon but not rare cases like "landing gear will not retract" OR the FMS manual needs to start with a big "WARNING: this will give incorrect results in the following cases! landing gear not retracted...."
If you take someone's bad arithmetic and put a program around it, people trust it a lot more. Mad Magazine was making jokes about this 50 years ago!
As someone who makes software, this personally pisses me off.
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Written by Tom Ritchford1.5K Followers
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