Just to be clear, I’m not faulting Airbus. I take issues with the shallow snark at Boeing. The JetBlue incident was serious.
Airbus isn’t immune to controversies , like AF447 or Habsheem air show crash in 1988
Just to be clear, I’m not faulting Airbus. I take issues with the shallow snark at Boeing. The JetBlue incident was serious.
Airbus isn’t immune to controversies , like AF447 or Habsheem air show crash in 1988
On the other hand, the software development practices were slow to modernize in many cases e.g. FORTRAN 66 (but eventually with a preprocessor).
Testing is (should be!) extremely robust, but only tested to the required parameters. If this incident put the subsystem in some atmospheric conditions nobody expected and nobody tested for, that does not suggest that the entire QA chain was garbage. It was a missed case -- and one that I expect would be covered going forward.
Aviation systems are not tested to work indefinitely or infinitely -- that's impossible to test, impossible to prove or disprove. You wouldn't claim that some subsystems works (say, for a quick easy example) in all temperature ranges; you would definite a reasonable operational range, and then test to that range. What may have happened here is that something occurred outside of an expected range.
Surprisingly Google couldn't handle the typo: Habsheim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296Q
3 dead, 133 survivors, started (undisputedly) with pilots intentionally and with approval trying to fly a plane full of passengers 30 meters off the ground, possibly with safety systems intentionally disabled for demonstration purposes.
Past that, there are disputes what kept them from applying enough power and elevator to get away from the trees that they were flying towards, including allegations of the black box data being swapped/faked.