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Software Glitch Caused Crash of Airbus A400M Military Transport Aircraft
An anonymous reader writes: A software glitch caused the crash of an Airbus A400M military transport aircraft, claims German newspaper Der Spiegel (Google translation). The accident, which happened in Seville on the vehicle's first production test flight on 9 May, killed four crew members. Airbus is investigating the system controlling the aircraft's engines. The early suspicions are that it was an installation problem, rather than a design problem.
The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey crashed 4 times during testing killing 30 crew members. The previous Airbus crash in testing was in 1994, if you want to go that far back there was a fatal Antonov An-70 crash in 2001, also due to engine problems. New aircraft sometimes crash as the bugs are worked out, the 787 was just lucky that none of the incidents were fatal.
All modern planes except light GA aircraft have engines have fully computer-controlled engines, it's called FADEC and it's what makes them efficient, reliable and much safer (in general). Sometimes these have bugs, particularly on new engine designs.
Some thing appear to have been lost in translation.
According to most other English language sources, apparently this A400 had a new software release that enabled it to control the fuel tank trim during some new types of maneuvers. It appears that some bug in this software triggered a situation where fuel was actually cut-off from the engines or perhaps the engines shut-off leading to a temporary engine stall (which proved to be unrecoverable). It's not clear exactly what happened yet, but I think they are close to ruling out a defect in the installed ECU (electronic control unit) itself, but not the software running on it.
Ironically, no FADEC software is French. However, I presume you masturbate to Boeing planes without until now knowing that they're designed exclusively on French software (CATIA by Dassault Systems).