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I wonder if they ever nailed down that "sudden decompression" problem possibility brought to light by Joseph Mangan. I tend to side with the guy because he has lost everything defending his viewpoint of using inferior automobile-grade chips to control valve hatches critical for compression as a danger. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mangan http://www.eaawatch.net/

I suggest you read about the financial reality of the life threatening shortcuts taken by AIRBUS, UTC, and TTTech in fraudulent violations of FAA and EASA regulations in the development and certification of the Safety Critical Cabin Pressurization and Control System on the AIRBUS A380, the worlds largest passenger aircraft. Even Boeing, who purchased this system from UTC, for the Boeing 787, later forced it to be redesigned to restore safety features because they had determined that the design was not safe! Newspaper and Television Coverage on the scandal. http://www.joe-mangan.com/ with technical details and evidence documents at http://www.eaawatch.net/

The statements by TTTech CFO Gerog Kopetz are defamatory libel and slander

The web site at www.eaawatch.net contains evidence to prove that these issues were known by

TTTech and Nord Micro since March 22 2004.

www.eaawatch.net/CAT_Documents Index.html

My employment contract began on April 1st 2004 and was terminated on October 5th 2004 for disclosing

Confidential documents to EASA, the memo disclosed is contained on the front page for you to read.

Do the math, April 1st to October 5th is more than 6 months, thereby my employment contract in Austria was unlimited,

As of September 30th.

Do not comment on a subject when you have failed to investigate the evidence.

Joe Mangan

This message is from Joe Mangan

www.eaawatch.net

www.joseph.mangan.name

www.joseph.mangan.com

The Commercial Aircraft Industry economic business model is seriously flawed, and is actively engaged in transferring financial risk from Corporations to threats to the lives of the passengers and crew without their informed consent.

This issue is not about AIRBUS vs BOEING, this is AIRBUS and Boeing, and FAA, and EASA, and the Aircraft system suppliers and their sub suppliers. This is about all of the elements of the system being under tremendous pressure to be overly aggressive in the use of untested, unproven, low cost technology containing high uncertainty. The use of technology of high uncertainty always results in projects taking far longer to complete and costing far more than originally planned. This is project risk, and risk is nearly always significantly underestimated in project planning of modern Aerospace Programs. In essence we have the worlds biggest game of ?Russian Roulette?. With Boeing and Airbus gambling that the other will

Pull the trigger on the chamber containing the live round, thus ending the game. I believe that what we are about to see if the combatants do not ?throttle back? is the ?story of the 3 Japanese fighting fish?, where the smart fish (China, India, Japan) allows the other 2 fish to fight to the death, leaving the survivor too weak to defend against the attach of the stronger smarter fish who wins unopposed.

I feel a great sympathy and compassion for those who failed the morality test, challenged with facing the agonizing decision over career and wealth, vs the cost to human lives of their choice. My Christian conscience would not allow me to look the other way, realizing that for my own comfort and security, I would have to knowingly rationalize my own selfish interest, and thereby place at risk the lives of innocent Men, Women, and Children.

I have waited an entire year (October 2004) in a tireless pursuit to work with AIRBUS, Nord Micro, TTTech, EASA, and FAA to correct these issues in private. These organizations refused to take any action. I was left with no other avenue than to pursue the issue in the public domain one year later. I had simply exhausted every opportunity available to me. I even visited the CEO of Nord Micro in his booth at the Paris Airshow, spending 40 minutes with him and his engineers in an attempt to convince them to act in the interest of public safety. Numerous failed attempts in good faith with TTTech are documented on my website. In each and every case, TTTech violated agreed to terms, and demanded in each case a retraction of my official statements to EASA and FAA, which has always been understood to be non-negotiable.

Are these people who failed the moral challenge evil? No, they must decide what is more important to them, the lives of people vs profit, comfort, and security for themselves. The laws currently favor those who choose profit over safety. Protections and safeguards, even in the United States are insufficient to motivate a whistleblower to put themselves and their families in ?harms way?. One only need to look at the Corporate Crime Spree of WORLDCOM, ENRON, TYCO, ADELPHIA, HEALTHSOUTH and others.

Conscience can only motivate a whistleblower to act first in the interest of others.

When confronted by Executive Management with data showing the program is significantly over schedule and over budget, direct pressure is applied to find a way to ?get back on schedule?. Just as with the WORLDCOM case of Ebbers, all that must be said, is that ?we have to make our numbers?, and th

I've read TFA, and had a good look at this guy's website (http://www.eaawatch.net/).

There might be something to his story, but I personally do not buy it. Simply because his website is of the "ultradense and incoherent ramblings of someone who forgot to take his medication" type.

I mean, sure, if he is legit he has a LOT of information to convey to convince you that he is right, but the structure and the writing style is an almost perfect replica of a conspircay theory site. If his blog were posted on somethingawful.com as "awful site of the day" the only difference would be that there are no photos of aliens or faces on mars on his pages, but the writing, style and layout is right up there with the best of them.

Completely unreadable, with LOTS of facts that no-one outside the companies in question can check. IF he had a valid complaint and IF he's such a good engineer he should be capable of presenting his gripes in a fashion that is comprehensible to his fellow engineers.

I mean, if he's getting his ass sued off anyway at this point, why not really say what's it all about on a technical level? All we get to hear about is that his former employer has a somewhat weaselly relationship with Airbus, and was not always 100% frank with them w/r to the testing of that chip.

Riight, like this never happens anywhere else. Not that it should - but these allegations, taken by themselves, especially *without* a smoking gun of "they were hiding THIS bug" (as opposed "the chip allegedly behaved funny sometimes"), do not carry as much weight as he thinks.

I might be completely wrong about this, but - based on his website - my instincts say that this guy is a crank.

Just my 0.2E-32 EUR

Certainly there is also criticism of the way Airbus have designed the cabin-pressure valves redundancy, but this can be tested and fixed.

One would think. Maybe you should RTFB

Right, but are the other systems using the same component? In Mangan's blog, as one of his concerns was redundancy. There are other systems, but they all use the exact same component, and apparently while Airbus requires dissimilar redundancy for safety critical systems, due to negligence it was not required in this case.

Umm, that's the whole point. The point about "COTS" is that the testing is less rigorous. Further, Mangan _was_ testing the system, and found flaws, but this component was not fixed, and Mangan was fired and told to shut up. He is also dubious about the redundancy of the system. Finally, apparently you didn't read the article as your propaganda claim is weak, since this component would also be used in other aircraft such as Boeing jets. Think of the German company Bosch, which makes many components for many car companies, such as diesel injectors. Further, his blog does not hold up Boeing as a shining example in any way.

Further interesting reading on the certification process from his blog is below, you leave out some critical details:

Aircraft Certification operates under the Honor System, with the manufacturers employees acting with delegated authority from the government. Employees approve testing and analysis data as compliant with aircraft certification requirements, regulations and policies, without oversight and review by government regulators. These employees are known as Designated Engineering Representatives of the government certification authorities or DER's.

Mangan's blog has significant details. It makes quite a bit of sense if this guy, has more integrity than your average person. He's a super smart guy apparently, and he's probably right, firing him was probably not a good idea. Who wouldn't be miffed, and want to restore their good name? For the Austrian company, I'm betting they don't have the time to improve the design, or fix it properly.

I've read the various articles in the LA Times and WSJ, and his blog, and my take is he is an engineer, and he's not going to let politics and bureaucrats cover this flawed design. Any whistleblower faces this - it's what sets them apart from the average person.

The articles are very interesting, he was testing the system and found flaws not only in the functionality but the system design (not redundant). Seems there's politics and big money involved.

I sat in on an ethics class, directed towards engineers, at Stanford once, forgot the name of the class, but the professor posed the question - if you, as an engineer on a major project (whether it be designing a new drug or a spaceship), and discovered an issue, what would you do? Now perhaps the dishonest person, rushing to finish the project and look good, would move on. The average person would write an e-mail perhaps, and then if nothing was done, perhaps at most quit their job. And if you're fired? Anyway, interesting class.

Here's the actual defect link: http://www.eaawatch.net/CAT_Defects.html Scroll down to defect #11415 - apparantly they used a macro to setup memory, but it doesn't correctly unused interupt vector addresses to a known state. If one of those interupts hits, the code will jump to a random location. The larger issue he has is that the use of that macro implies that the software was not developed from an already approved codebase (approved in the sense that it's undergone all the testing this type of application calls for), yet it was signed off that it had. He also has some issues with the RTOS scheduler.

1. say as little as needed to avoid getting entangled in details or...
2. say as little as possible so Airbus is deceived into thinking the part is "simple."

In this document he asserts that the OS that runs on the chip was hacked together and that the software being delivered to Airbus was not put together according to the software engineering standards Airbus requires of its sub-contractors. He also says:

In numerous official review findings by Honeywell International employees performing the role of external reviewers, led by Honeywell Engines and Systems Tucson, Software Quality Assurance Manager Jeff Young, TTTech consistently failed to deliver documentation, tests, and process compliance evidence at an acceptable level of quality.

1. say as little as needed to avoid getting entangled in details or...
2. say as little as possible so Airbus is deceived into thinking the part is "simple."

In this document he asserts that the OS that runs on the chip was hacked together and that the software being delivered to Airbus was not put together according to the software engineering standards Airbus requires of its sub-contractors. He also says:

In numerous official review findings by Honeywell International employees performing the role of external reviewers, led by Honeywell Engines and Systems Tucson, Software Quality Assurance Manager Jeff Young, TTTech consistently failed to deliver documentation, tests, and process compliance evidence at an acceptable level of quality.

Looks like his blog is here: http://www.eaawatch.net/

I'm not positive this is his blog (it looks more like a static web page) but it does have a ton of information on the subject:
http://www.eaawatch.net/index.html