F-22 fighter jet felled by International Date Line
February 27, 2007Scary and funny at the same time–the $125-million F-22 Raptor apparently has a glitch in its software that causes everything to crash when the plane crosses over the International Date Line. Apparently somewhere deep down in the code they forgot to account for the IDL.
Back many years ago, I briefly worked for Simmonds Precision Aerospace, which at the time was working on the fuel-management system for the F-22. Kinda cool project, though the boss was a real rhymes-with-witch. And of course highly compartmentalized–we worked strictly on the fuel management software, had no interaction with any developers working on any other system.
In an environment like that, where everything is treated as completely separate black boxes, it’s inevitable that some kind of interaction will be overlooked. Because there’s nobody who really has a deep-level understanding of all the systems and what problems might come up from the various design decisions made in each system.