Word: controling
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After seemingly an eternity - in reality, the nosedive lasted 20 very long seconds - the flight crew wrested control of the plane from its wayward computer and made an emergency landing at a remote military and mining airstrip 650 miles short of Perth. (Watch TIME's video of the rescue of US Airways flight...
Following an investigation of the A330's uncommanded dive, Australian aviation officials, assisted by U.S. and French authorities, blamed a pair of simultaneous failures for the near disaster. The plane has three air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs), which are designed to help the plane's flight-control computer fly the plane safely. The system is intended to eliminate the possibility of electronic error: the flight computer, which is always monitoring the trio, can disregard one ADIRU if it begins relaying information that conflicts with the other...
...that's not what happened when one of them went awry on Oct. 7 and began sending erroneous data spikes on the plane's angle of attack (AOA) - the angle between its wings and the air flowing over them - to the flight-control computer. "For some reason, the damn computer disregarded the healthy channels," says Hans Weber, an aviation expert who heads Tecop International, an aviation-consulting firm in San Diego. "Instead, it acted upon the information from the rogue channel." The computer, responding to the faulty data, put the plane into a dive. (Read "Is There a Cause...
Aviation authorities around the world have ordered inspections and procedures to try to eliminate the problem. "In these fly-by-wire systems, one never really knows if one has checked out all possible combinations of events to make sure that the computer properly reacts," Weber says of modern flight control. Fly-by-wire systems use computers and wires instead of mechanics and hydraulics to control a plane's flight. Electronic systems are more reliable than mechanical processes but are prone to software errors that can't always be anticipated. "There could be some other sequence of events that could cause...
...been exploited by jihadists around the world - and also the home country of most of the 9/11 hijackers. The Kingdom supported Operation Desert Storm in 1991, in which a U.S. multinational force drove Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait, and its Prince Sultan Air Base served as a command-and-control center for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Saudi Arabia has also championed a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, offering full normalization of relations with the Jewish state if it withdraws from Arab territory conquered in the war of 1967. And as the leader...