Re: OT: This system must have been written in Ruby...

Kenneth Tilton <kentilton@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

"At 1950 feet (around 700 meters) the airplane's left altimeter suddenly
and mistakenly registered an altitude of 8 feet (about 2 meters) below
sea level and passed the reading on to the automatic control system, Van
Vollenhoven said.
....

What system acts on an impossible data discontinuity, let alone one that
has the plane below sea-level? And then fails to fly the plane?

Well, when landing in the Netherlands, I imagine it might actually be
possible to be flying at 8 feet below sea level.

And a check with data about Schiphol airport confirms it. The runway at
the airport is at an elevation of -11 feet. So the reading was, in
fact, a legal and even expected data input value for a landing aircraft.

http://www.world-airport-codes.com/netherlands/amsterdam-schiphol-225.html?page=5

Why is anyone but me allowed to program computers?!!!

Hmmm. I wonder what Kenny's flight control software would have done
when a plane came in for a landing at that airport? What would happen
when it encountered the "impossible" input?

Shudder.


=============
But in another OT item from that same article:

"Some [passengers] didn't realize the landing had gone wrong until
other passengers began opening emergency doors."

Wow! Talk about being conditioned to accept rough landings...


--
Thomas A. Russ, USC/Information Sciences Institute
.

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