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Electronic Failure In Qantas Airbus

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008, 8:25 GMT

Filed in: Real-world by francois |
Tags: Accident, Airbus, Qantas

As you can read on AVweb the accident with a Qantas A330-300 last week that made two sudden dives or ‘drops’ and injured a large number of passengers wasn’t caused by a passenger’s notebook or other electronic device, but by an internal malfunction of the Airbus’s flight-control computer system. This was communicated by the the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. The aircraft was flying at FL 370 en route from Singapore to Perth when the Inertial Reference System malfunctioned, which resulted in the autopilot automatically disconnecting, the ATSB said. You can read the entire artice on AVweb.com.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 8:25 and is filed under Real-world. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. Eagleskinner says:
   October 15th, 2008 at 8:47

   Now that does make interesting reading. It’ll certainly be something that Airbus is now working hard to fix behind the scenes. But what this does conjure up is a review of the FS failures systems. For instance, do the default “failures” include something like this? Is there a market for “disaster missions”. It certainly would give mission designers something to do - i.e. to create survivable, potentially catastrophic failures. Mission ratings would depend on how you handle it.

   Big planes and little planes!