Birgenair Flight 301 crash
A Boeing 757 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, killing all 189 people aboard.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
A Boeing 757 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, killing all 189 people aboard.
What the software actually got wrong
An insect nest blocked one of the aircraft's pitot tubes, and because the autopilot and autothrottle were both designed to draw airspeed data only from the captain's single primary source, they fed erroneous readings into the flight controls and triggered conflicting stall and overspeed warnings that overwhelmed the crew at night with no visual reference.
An insect nest blocked one of the aircraft's pitot...
An insect nest blocked one of the aircraft's pitot tubes
Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.
Because the autopilot and autothrottle were both designed to...
because the autopilot and autothrottle were both designed to draw airspeed data only from the captain's single primary source, they fed erroneous readings into the flight controls and triggered conflicting stall and overspeed warnings that overwhelmed the crew at night with no visual reference
Requs AI Software FMEA traces this failure mode back to the system-level hazard it feeds, tagging it against the Common Defect Enumeration so it surfaces in review instead of in the field.
Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing
Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.
Surfaces this before code exists
Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.
Connects the failure mode to the hazard
Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.
Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.
Schedule a demonstration, or explore how Requs AI Edge Case and Software FMEA use the Common Defect Enumeration.