China Airlines Flight 006 near-crash
The Boeing 747 entered a steep, near-vertical dive and lost over 30,000 feet of altitude after an engine failure, severely damaging the aircraft; there were no fatalities among the 274 aboard.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
The Boeing 747 entered a steep, near-vertical dive and lost over 30,000 feet of altitude after an engine failure, severely damaging the aircraft; there were no fatalities among the 274 aboard.
What the software actually got wrong
After an engine lost power, the autopilot silently applied increasing control inputs to compensate for the resulting yaw and roll without alerting the crew, masking the developing upset until the autopilot's authority was exceeded and it disconnected, leaving the aircraft in an extreme, unexpected attitude.
After an engine lost power, the autopilot silently applied...
After an engine lost power, the autopilot silently applied increasing control inputs to compensate for the resulting yaw and roll without alerting the crew, masking the developing upset until the autopilot's authority was exceeded and it disconnected, leaving the aircraft in an extreme, unexpected attitude.
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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