Posted on 08/29/2010 5:40:07 PM PDT by Flavius
A corrupted USB stick contributed to Spain's worst air disaster on record, according to a 12,000-page report cited by the Spanish newspaper El Pais and USA Today.
It was initially believed that the crash of Flight 5022 that killed 154 people in 2008 was the result of pilot error, but investigators have now concluded that a computer infection spread through an infected USB stick may have contributed to the crash.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytech.com ...
not this hogwash again, how many times is this crash going to be blamed on malware????
That's more pages that the Obamacare bill. Reports don't need to be anywhere near that long unless they are intended to obfuscate and confuse.
I will never knowingly get on any aircraft that contains microsoft products.
And this is NOT a joke.
Microsoft products, however, are.
I should add to my above comment, howwever.
NO competent pilot would have allowed any of the reasons stated in the article to cause a crash.
Somehow, without computers, pilots have managed to check flap positions, etc. using (wait for it) their own eyes.
I laugh when I fly with some of the recent private pilots, who would be lost without GPS and computer aided auto pilots. I could only wish they were piloting Air Force One. (However, our AF-1 military pilots - no matter what they think about the Loon-In-Chief, wouldn’t be fooled by faulty computer readings).
The computer had nothing to do with it. It was working, just slow. The pilots did not do their job.
BTW, I’d wager that microsoft played a significant part in the design and construction of the airplane.
Wow, it must be fun going into one of those tricky drop over the mountain, power it towards the earth, pull full flaps, and 5mph over stall get the BSOD!
The need to yack on the radio non-stop because they like to feel self-important is notably worse as well.
I don’t know.
People seem to want to think the plane itself had malware loaded on it’s computers, and it seems impossible to knock that notion out of their heads...
The crash was due to pilot error.
Just to be clear, the computer that was infected was not on the plane, and had nothing to do with controlling or flying the plane.
[Collapse Comment] Virus Had NOTHING To Do With The Crash
By DougF on 8/24/2010 8:35:04 AM , Rating: 5
quote:
The report indicates that the computer failed to detect three problems (including one issue with the airplane's wing flaps being in the incorrect position for takeoff) in a fail-safe monitoring system and that those problems were brought on by a malicious program that came from the USB thumb drive.
Wrong again. I've read the report and it CLEARLY states that the aircrew had the aircraft in "flight" mode, where the weight on wheels (WOW) switch is overridden in the cockpit. Normally, this is used for ground maintenance troubleshooting, and is NOT an approved part of pre-flight switchology. With the WOW switch in "flight" mode, the temperature probe registered a fault, which was then turned off as it is redundant for flight. With the aircraft in "flight" mode, there would have been NO warning or error logged as part of the takeoff process, as the aircraft already thinks it's in flight. The "problem" is that the aircrew was monkeying around with switches and put themselves and the passengers in grave danger.
The aircrew successfully defeated THREE SAFTEY PROCEDURES: 1) They had the WOW in "flight" mode for takeoff; 2) The aircrew said, but did NOT check the indication for flaps/slats in the cockpit; and 3) The aircrew failed to conduct a MANDATORY visual inspection for the flaps/slats from the cockpit windows.
Those three safety violations killed the aircrew, the passengers, and destroyed the aircraft, NOT a virus on the airline's mainframe. The virus did affect the showing of multiple faults, but that had NOTHING to do with this accident. The enquiry is simply finding additional problems that need to be addressed, they are not saying the virus had anything to do with this crash.C'mon read the report...
Microsoft makes a such good villain that the story just HAS TO be true.
Microsoft, which I now call MacroSludge.
I just upgraded to Office 2010. This is the biggest POS that I have run into from Macrosludge. I have had complete system lockups requiring hard reboots, and also multiple times where the software dumps, claiming to be unlicensed.
To bad DEC was a company with piss poor management, since looking back X-Windows had much more potential and stability. A Windows style GUI running on top of UNIX - or is that what Mac OS-X is supposed to be?
This is what’s scary in my line of work. A lot of industrial automation systems (operator interfaces, data historians, fortunately not the logic/control engines in PLC’s yet) are based on some MacroSludge operating system. This includes refineries, power plants, and pipelines. I have referred to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as anal retentive, but if they decide to decertify any control equipment (including operator interfaces, and anything else directly associated with plant operation) that runs MacroSludge, I would in this case see their point.
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