According to Ars Technica, an airbus executive said that the engine control software was "misconfigured" during engine installation at the factory, and was responsible for the crash. We think this means that some program changes that were supposed to be made at installation (for instance "remember this engine serial number" or "set engine hours to zero") were not made, or were not made properly. The executive claimed that this was not a bug in the code.
Oh really. Code that crashes an airplane ain't right. Good code will keep the plane flying even if it is "misconfigured". Aviation Week's report of a couple of weeks ago suggested that the engine control software shut off fuel to all four engines. That should never happen, no matter what.
I wonder if the Ariane 5 software hackers were allowed to work on the A400M. The Ariane 5 crash, some years ago, destroying the rocket and its expensive satellite payload happened when the engine control software suffered an arithmetic overflow and the program simply halted. In the after crash investigation, it was revealed that the software spec required the program to halt after overflow. The excuse was made at the time that this helped troubleshooting. The programmers in the Ariane case did what they were told to do, with disastrous results.
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