FAA Los Angeles air traffic control system shutdown
About 3 hours of lost radio contact between controllers and aircraft over Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah; hundreds of flights were delayed, diverted or cancelled, and investigators found several aircraft had come dangerously close together.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
About 3 hours of lost radio contact between controllers and aircraft over Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah; hundreds of flights were delayed, diverted or cancelled, and investigators found several aircraft had come dangerously close together.
What the software actually got wrong
The Voice Switching and Control System's software was designed to shut itself down automatically unless a technician manually reset an internal countdown timer every 30 days; the reset was missed, and a backup system that was supposed to take over had been misconfigured and failed to activate.
The Voice Switching and Control System's software was designed...
The Voice Switching and Control System's software was designed to shut itself down automatically unless a technician manually reset an internal countdown timer every 30 days
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 reset was missed
the reset was missed
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.
A backup system that was supposed to take over...
a backup system that was supposed to take over had been misconfigured and failed to activate
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.