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NASA NTRS · Conference Paper
The Dangers of Failure Masking in Fault-Tolerant Software: Aspects of a Recent In-Flight Upset Event
Attribution
This is the abstract and citation. Full text lives at NASA NTRS — we link out rather than host. All credit to the authors and Langley Research Center.
Abstract
Verbatim from NASA NTRS. Not paraphrased, not summarized.
On 1 August 2005, a Boeing Company 777-200 aircraft, operating on an international passenger flight from Australia to Malaysia, was involved in a significant upset event while flying on autopilot. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau's investigation into the event discovered that an anomaly existed in the component software hierarchy that allowed inputs from a known faulty accelerometer to be processed by the air data inertial reference unit (ADIRU) and used by the primary flight computer, autopilot and other aircraft systems. This anomaly had existed in original ADIRU software, and had not been detected in the testing and certification process for the unit. This paper describes the software aspects of the incident in detail, and suggests possible implications concerning complex, safety-critical, fault-tolerant software.
Authors
- Johnson, C. W. Glasgow Univ.
- Holloway, C. M. NASA Langley Research Center
Citation: Johnson, C. W., Holloway, C. M. (2019). The Dangers of Failure Masking in Fault-Tolerant Software: Aspects of a Recent In-Flight Upset Event. Langley Research Center. NASA NTRS ID 20070034017. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20070034017 ↗