Qantas Airbus A380 engine failure in 2010 (2023)

Like Boeing, there was organizational dysfunction leading to a direct safety issue.

During the development of the A380, the German and French sides were using different versions of the CATIA PLM software (i.e. CAD), which prevented people from looking at a single unified model of the plane. One concrete problem it caused was major problems with the wiring harnesses, which led to a 2 year delay in the program, and 3 early A380's which couldn't be sold. (Airbus kept one for test, the other two got sent to museums)

That manifested in this accident because the wing wiring was routed through the engine disk burst axes (a hazard which is explicitly accounted for) with insufficient redundancy. That created the dangerous situation where they couldn't turn off the engine after landing.

> That created the dangerous situation where they couldn't turn off the engine after landing.

Which is vastly preferable compared to all of the dangerous situations just prior to that landing.

I thought this was a strange insertion of geopolitics into the conversation so I checked out this account’s comment history. It’s good for others to see that some commenters here have a serious axe to grind and are not really “hackers” as their primary interest here. The most recent comments in order:

> [something about london taxi drivers, admittedly unrelated]

> I totally get you and in theory you are right. And yet, in the USA you have gerrymandering and apparently _wanted_ Trump. Twice. Something has to be very wrong somewhere.

> I would suggest "lobbying" is not the correct word to describe all the corruption going on in the current USA administration cesspool.

>I recently bought a BambuLab 3D printer. Designed and made in China. Right from the unpacking to first print the experience was top Apple-style quality. Indeed I was agreeably surprised.

> A global non USA success? Plenty. You might want to remove your pink USA glasses and look around. Spotify good enough for you?

> I am Canadian. Never, ever would i knowingly buy any dairy products from the USA , at any price. We have cows too, and farmers.

> Its not that it hates its customers , as much as it it a USA-based company that is run under the rules made by the administration. Not that much different from running Red Star OS from North Korea, actually.

> [Finally something unrelated]

The vastly preferable situation was to have redundant wiring that properly complied with regulations, which was retrofitted in an airworthiness directive (safety recall) after the accident.

They also required engine software that detected the sudden increase in speed associated with a shaft break and automatically cut fuel.

  > The detailed software allowed them to enter various parameters including the weather, runway condition, and any systems failures, and then calculate whether it was possible to land. But when everything had been entered, the program spit out an unhelpful answer: “no result.”

 > When calculating the landing distance, the software applied a generic “operational coefficient” to account conservatively for variations in pilot techniques that could result in less efficient deceleration. The problem, as investigators would later discover, was that the software applied the coefficient again whenever another system failure was added. With so many system failures on the aircraft, the coefficient was applied a total of 9 times, resulting in a calculated landing distance considerably greater than the length of the available runway. However, Check Captain Evans was able to fix the problem by manually entering their actual landing weight, overriding the program’s assumption of a maximum landing weight. By specifying a landing weight in excess of the maximum, the system logic changed to apply the operational coefficient only once — for unrelated and obscure reasons — and lo and behold, when he ran the numbers this time, the computer said they could just barely land on any of the 4,000-meter runways at Singapore Changi Airport, with only 100 meters to spare.

This reeks so much of if-then-else programming as opposed to making a well-typed conceptual model computable.