China Airlines Flight 140 crash (Nagoya)
An Airbus A300 crashed while landing at Nagoya, Japan, killing 264 of the 271 people aboard.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
An Airbus A300 crashed while landing at Nagoya, Japan, killing 264 of the 271 people aboard.
What the software actually got wrong
The first officer inadvertently triggered the autopilot's go-around mode, and as he continued pushing the control column forward against it, the autopilot progressively applied more nose-up trim to try to achieve the commanded climb; the automation and the crew fought each other for control until the aircraft stalled and crashed.
The first officer inadvertently triggered the autopilot's go-around mode
The first officer inadvertently triggered the autopilot's go-around mode
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.
As he continued pushing the control column forward against...
as he continued pushing the control column forward against it, the autopilot progressively applied more nose-up trim to try to achieve the commanded climb
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 automation and the crew fought each other for...
the automation and the crew fought each other for control until the aircraft stalled and crashed
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.