Musical Wings Reduce Aircraft Stall Risk

notwrong writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that a Qantas engineer has found a way to help small aircraft avoid stalling at low speeds: pumping sound through the wings. He found that music also works, having tested Spiderbait and Radiohead (nice choices; Spiderbait apparently works better)."

Comments

Re:As a pilot

[drgonzo59]

I think Boeing's flight control computer is based of Integrity-178B by Green Hills that uses a separation kernel. In fact there is LynxSecure, AESecure, VxWorks and LynxOS-178 but Integrity-178B is by far the one with the smallest separation kernel thus the more secure one. Because it can be mathematically proved that it is correct (does what it is supposed to do and nothing more or else),so anything with 500,000 lines (think Linux kernel) is no good for that, need something that is no more than a couple of thousand lines and it still can take up to 2 years to complete the verification process.

So what do you do if ya want complex and sofisticated system calls that the Integrity-178B doesn't provide? Well, use another real-time os on top of Integrity-178B or make it part of Integrity-178B but run it in user mode. So all the drivers are really in user mode in such a system. This all is needed so that no single program if corrupted can hang the system. (Trust me you don't want an airliner's computer to freeze with a BSoD or with a Oops!-Kernel Panic while in mid-air).

Another side note, FAA actually has a concrete limit on the failure due to software. So something like no more than once out of tens of millions of flight hours a plane full of people is allowed to completely crash and burn because of a software problem and have everyone on board die a horrible and painfull death and that would be perfectly "ok" with FAA. So the requirements to certify a system (OS) to fly a plane are very stringent. Linux doesn't even come close. It might be good enough to play music though...