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Engine failure studied in Cameroon crash (114 dead)
AP/Yahoo ^ | 7 May 07 | HEIDI VOGT

Posted on 05/07/2007 12:57:00 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback

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To: Mack the knife

Wow! Where are you getting that info about the crash of the Southern Airways DC-9 in 1977? None of the 3 points you made are true according to the NTSB report http://amelia.db.erau.edu/reports/ntsb/aar/AAR78-03.pdf


21 posted on 05/07/2007 3:12:03 PM PDT by willk
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To: willk

Wow! Where are you getting that info about the crash of the Southern Airways DC-9 in 1977?


I looked into it when it occurred, since I flew that route frequently. Huntsville is a “small town”.

The official report was not going to fault the airline for not buying the onboard batteries because there were other two engine aircraft in service in the same condition flying for other airlines. And Southern Airways was not the only airline that did not specify weather radars to be “critical” (i.e., if there was a storm, you couldn’t fly if it was down). And new Air Traffic Controllers at Atlanta Airport were made familiar with what was 100 miles downrange as part of their orientation.

There was another casualty of this accident - the Patriot Missile system.

The oversight of the Patriot missile system development was performed by the Patriot Project Office of the Army at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville AL. They discovered just before the Southern 242 accident that the developing Contractor had lost control of the software development - the software developers were testing the software at White Sands, finding problems, and making patches to the machine level code to fix them, and sending what they thought were the appropriate changes to the source code back to the main plant. So the software running at White Sands had thousands of patches not generated from the source code.

The Army Project Manager scheduled a trip to the Contractor’s software development site for all members of the Project Office to force the Contractor to stop work and fixt the problem ... and all traveled on Southern Airways 242.

They all died in the crash.

It took many months to bring in new people and try to get them up to speed enough to discover the problem again, and by that time the number of patches had doubled. The “get well plan” required an almost complete redevelopment of the software, and resulted in a delivery of poorer quality, higher cost, and years late.......your tax dollars at work.

So the Patriot System was another casualty of the crash of Southern Airways 242. It also resulted in a new rule that members of a military Project Office going to an offsite meeting take different flights.


22 posted on 05/08/2007 9:12:21 AM PDT by Mack the knife
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