Re: Ariane 5 Failure from 1996

[Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>]

John McCabe wrote:
> jonathan <johnscpg@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Any program that met the requirements would have destroyed the flight
>> at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way. It could
>> have been written in C, Ada, or assembly and if it met the
>> requirements
>> exactly it would have destroyed flight 501 the same 37 seconds
>> after liftoff.
>>
>> Post-flight analysis described the problem as a requirements failure .
>>
>> (That's my memory of the event.)

Agrees with my understanding.

> ...
> The point this
> guy was making was that, in C, the machine fault would not have
> occured as the overflow would have been allowed to happen and 3 or 4
> seconds later the SRI would have shut down as expected (well, as
> required for Ariane 4!) and all would have been well.

That is like a bit arguing against using seatbelts in a car because you 
know of one (very strange) accident in which a person wearing a seatbelt 
was killed while a person not wearing a seatbelt would perhaps have 
survived. While such arguments were used years ago against the mandatory 
use of seatbelts, I don't think many would accept them today, because we 
know that seatbelts are beneficial in most accidents.