Air France Flight 447 crash
An Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 people aboard.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
An Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 people aboard.
What the software actually got wrong
Ice crystals blocked the pitot tubes, causing airspeed data to briefly become unreliable; the autopilot and autothrust disconnected and the flight control laws degraded from 'normal' to 'alternate' law, silently removing certain stall protections, and the crew's control inputs held the aircraft in a stall it never recovered from.
Ice crystals blocked the pitot tubes, causing airspeed data...
Ice crystals blocked the pitot tubes, causing airspeed data to briefly become unreliable
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.
The autopilot and autothrust disconnected and the flight control...
the autopilot and autothrust disconnected and the flight control laws degraded from 'normal' to 'alternate' law, silently removing certain stall protections
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.
The crew's control inputs held the aircraft in a...
the crew's control inputs held the aircraft in a stall it never recovered from
Requs AI Edge Case and Software FMEA together treat this as a known, catalogued defect pattern — not a novel surprise — so it gets tested for deliberately rather than discovered after deployment.
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.