Outside Expertise for the FAA
The crew of the Korean Air jumbo jet that crashed on Guam last Wednesday knew that a radar guidance beam at the airport was down for repairs. But there was at least one thing that Flight 801 pilots and airport traffic controllers did not know before the plane plowed into the ground, killing 226 passengers and crew members: that one of many redundant safeguards, the minimum safe altitude warning system, had failed completely.
The computer system should have given ground controllers audible and visual warnings that Flight 801 was dangerously low as it approached the airport. A National Transportation Safety Board spokesman said Monday that the warning system “could have made a difference.” The problem, according to the NTSB, was computer software that had been installed by the Federal Aviation Administration. The software was supposed to have fixed an earlier glitch that had triggered false warnings.
Federal government officials have encountered enormous problems in upgrading and maintaining computer systems and software. The FAA and the Internal Revenue Service are prominent examples. Unfortunately, software development in general carries a high failure rate. And “patching” or correcting programming problems is not easy. The correction should be run through as many scenarios as possible to make certain it was installed properly, functions as intended and has not added even more glitches. Just how careful were the tests for this software solution?
There are about 200 such systems at U.S. airports. Now, the FAA has ordered the testing of all within the next two days. That’s the best action to take at this point. But one must wonder why the impressive computer and software expertise available to the federal government, from national security sources to the national laboratories and others, has not been brought to bear on the well-publicized inadequacies of some federal agencies.
No one involved in the crash investigation is saying that the failure of the warning system caused the crash, but the mere fact that this safeguard did not work gives pause and puts the agency’s computer problems in a stark and worrisome light.
