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in reply to @ticky's post:

in reply to @kda's post:

Yeah, I'm definitely somewhat familiar with the Therac-25 debacle from previous reading, but I've yet to hear… … …that much about it?

I'm mostly interested to see if they've done deeper research about what, specifically, went wrong on the development end, because. Fuck.

I won't spoil it for you, then!

I think it's telling about my personality that, for purposes of mentoring young software quality types, I kept/keep a list of my favourite terrible bugs, and they were all in fact really horrible bugs, and most of them were aerospace bugs, but none of them were fatal.

Huh. …yeah, I'm not surprised that aerospace would produce a ton of bugs that have horrific implications but never manage to kill people? It's got the right combination of required risk aversion/precautionary safety and sheer number of things that can go wrong to lead to that.

Uncrewed spaceflight has plenty, of course, but it turns out that many aircraft bugs are caught in situations where they didn't kill someone but if things had been different they could have. My favourite of these is the F-22 Raptors losing their glass cockpit while en route to Japan from Hawaii when they crossed the International Date Line. They made it back home safely by following their accompanying KC-135 like a bunch of little lost ducklings. (The fly-by-wire systems that keep the aircraft in the air and controllable are airgap separated from the glass cockpit, which is why they didn't fall out of the sky immediately.)