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Case Study #215 — 300 Software Failure Case Studies

TAROM Flight 371 crash

An Airbus A310 crashed shortly after takeoff from Bucharest, killing all 60 people aboard.

1995-03-31
When it happened
Aviation
Sector
#215 of 300
Ranked by documented impact
01 — What Happened

The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.

An Airbus A310 crashed shortly after takeoff from Bucharest, killing all 60 people aboard.

Aviation
Sector affected
1995-03-31
Date of the event
#215
Rank in the 300 Software Failure Case Studies
2
Distinct root-cause clauses identified below
02 — The Root Cause

What the software actually got wrong

A faulty electrical connection sent an erroneous signal to the autothrottle system, which responded by winding one engine back to idle thrust during the climb; the resulting asymmetric thrust and the crew's disorientation in fog led to a loss of control that investigators linked to inadequate protections against acting on a single bad sensor input.

01Root Cause

A faulty electrical connection sent an erroneous signal to...

What Happened

A faulty electrical connection sent an erroneous signal to the autothrottle system, which responded by winding one engine back to idle thrust during the climb

How Requs AI Catches This

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.

02Root Cause

The resulting asymmetric thrust and the crew's disorientation in...

What Happened

the resulting asymmetric thrust and the crew's disorientation in fog led to a loss of control that investigators linked to inadequate protections against acting on a single bad sensor input

How Requs AI Catches This

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.

03 — How This Gets Caught Before It Happens

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.

Requs AI Edge Case

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.

Requs AI Software FMEA

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.