Re: software failure question

["Ken Garlington" <Ken.Garlington@computer.org>]

I think this is the urban legend related to the F-16. As best as I have been
able to reconstruct events, this did not happen in an F-16 in flight, but in
a ground-based F-16 flight *simulator*. Apparently, only the northern
hemisphere was programmed correctly into the simulation; when the pilot
crossed the equator, the sudden transition in reference coordinates caused
the simulation to show the pilot as inverted. You might check the RISKS
digest at

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18.94.html#subj14.1

for more information. (Note that there's some second-hand, obsolete, and
just plain wrong junk about the F-16 in RISKS as well, so reader beware.)

<tmoran@acm.org> wrote in message
news:9Pxz6.992$ix4.198187@news1.rdc1.sfba.home.com...
: Anyone know where this came from?
: "In one infamous software error, a misplaced minus sign resulted in a
: fighter jet's control system flipping the aircraft on its back whenever
: it crossed the equator. "
: http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999595