COCKPIT displays plunged into darkness, engines that throttle back during take-off and contradictory airspeed readings are just some of the problems caused in recent years by inexplicable failures in the software that controls aircraft.
So far there are no known cases of such failures alone causing an accident. Speculation that software problems led to the crash landing of the British Airways Boeing 777 at Heathrow airport, London, on 17 January remain unconfirmed. While software was implicated in the Korean Air jumbo jet crash in August 1997 on Guam, which killed 228 people, human error, not software design, was to…
