Ladies and gentlemen, meet the air data inertial reference unit (ADIRU) from the Airbus A330-303. This little beauty generates helpful data that flight control systems rely on. When everything works correctly no one has much cause to think about their ADIRU. When they fail, however, it is tremendously bad (some Aussies figured this out in 2008).
Now, before you start accosting your friendly neighborhood flight attendant to see their ADIRU maintenance records, consider this little tidbit buried in the article, “It’s not clear what caused the ADIRU to shift into failure mode, as this is only the third time that it has happened in over 128 million hours of operation”. 128 million hours of operation and three bugs?!? Think about that success rate. That’s 14,611 years of flight time!
I’ve been working on and with software for the majority of my life. We’ve got a certain amount of liberty developing websites (looking at you, everyone I’ve every worked with). If a feature crashes once in a while, or the entire site becomes briefly unavailable, most often it goes unnoticed. In the worst case scenario, we might have some unhappy users. When avionics fail, metal tubes filled with people drop out of the sky. On the web we might miss the occasional edge case when validating user inputs. These guys are contending with “a high-energy atmospheric particle striking one of the integrated circuits within the unit.” The reliability of these kinds of integrated systems given the complexity is absolutely insane.
So my hat is off to you, mission critical software engineers everywhere. You seldom receive the praise that the media heaps on your web counterparts, but I, for one, appreciate you keeping me from a fiery death.
