Korean Air Lines Flight 007 navigational drift
A Boeing 747 strayed roughly 300 miles off its planned route into Soviet airspace and was shot down by a Soviet fighter jet, killing all 269 people aboard.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
A Boeing 747 strayed roughly 300 miles off its planned route into Soviet airspace and was shot down by a Soviet fighter jet, killing all 269 people aboard.
What the software actually got wrong
Investigators concluded the crew failed to notice that the autopilot had remained in 'heading' mode instead of being switched over to the inertial-navigation-coupled mode after takeoff, so the aircraft flew a constant compass heading rather than following its programmed route, drifting steadily off course for over five hours without the crew detecting the growing deviation.
Investigators concluded the crew failed to notice that the...
Investigators concluded the crew failed to notice that the autopilot had remained in 'heading' mode instead of being switched over to the inertial-navigation-coupled mode after takeoff, so the aircraft flew a constant compass heading rather than following its programmed route, drifting steadily off course for over five hours without the crew detecting the growing deviation.
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.
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.
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