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Trojan-Infected Computer Linked To 2008 Spanair Crash

Posted by Soulskill on from the blue-screen-of-literal-death dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Two years ago, Spanair flight JK-5022 crashed shortly after takeoff in Madrid, killing 154 of its 172 passengers and crew. El Pais online newspaper reports that the ground computer responsible for triggering an alarm after three failures are reported in a plane failed to do so. The computer was infected with trojans (Google translation of Spanish original)."

1 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. Swiss cheese by Fzz · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The crash of an airliner these days is rarely due to a single cause. There's a saying in the industry that a crash occurs when the holes in the Swiss cheese happen to line up. This appears to have been the case with this particular crash.
    • The direct cause was that the pilots attempted to take off without setting take-off flaps.
    • They were rushing because they'd had a technical issue, and returned to the terminal after previously taxiing to the runway and completing the take-off checks. So they accidentally skipped the critical check that the flaps were deployed when they lined up to take off the second time.
    • There's a take-off configuration alarm that is supposed to alert the pilots, but it wasn't working.
    • It wasn't working because the engineer removed the circuit breaker that powered it, in order to turn off a stuck heater on a pitot tube that was due to a malfunctioning switch.
    • This particular fault had been noted on previous flights, so should have flagged a warning on the airline's fault monitoring system.
    • The fault monitoring system had a trojan.

    Yup, the holes in the cheese certainly lined up that day. None of these, by itself, would have caused the crash.