Re: Ada in Boeing 787

[jonathan <johnscpg@googlemail.com>]

On Feb 4, 4:09 am, Jerry <lancebo...@qwest.net> wrote:
> I have an engineer friend who is a long-time employee of Honeywell
> Flight Systems who claims that the Boeing 787 does not use Ada ("It's
> an old language"). My friend, as i recall, manages a project involving
> the airplane's entertainment system which he says uses C and C++ ...

I have clear memories of reading about this in the
early years of in-flight entertainment systems.  I
think it was about 1997/8 .. some UK trade journal
had a small article about a (very) major UK aerospace
company that lost significant money that year entirely
on cost overruns of a million line C/C++ in-flight
entertainment system for (I think) the 777. Same article
said that that year it delivered air flight control
system software in Ada on time and under budget. I enjoyed
that .. might have some small details wrong so I won't
name names, but I remember the Ada v. C++ part of it clearly.
I did some Googling myself. The following 1998 article from
the New York Times seems consistent with my memory:

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/19/business/entertainment-in-the-skies-glitches-still-hurting-video-with-wings.html?pagewanted=2

A quote (but, as they say, read the whole thing):

  Indeed, B/E Aerospace spent three years developing a
  top-line system for British Airways worth as much as
  $155 million before the airline finally abandoned the
  effort last fall after numerous delays. Northwest Airlines
  had a similar experience with Hughes-Avicom, a division
  of the giant Hughes Electronics unit of General Motors.
  And in 1996, United Airlines sued GEC-Marconi, a unit
  of the General Electric Company of Britain when it failed
  to deliver on its promises for an entertainment system
  designed for the first Boeing 777. (The two sides settled
  out of court last fall.)

  The biggest problem with those early systems was that
  they worked only 90 percent of the time, which meant
  that even on flights where the systems were offered only
  in first and business class, a half-dozen seats or more
  might have been out of order.

The cynic in me pictures management types saying:
"Oh good, its not flight control software. Its in-flight
entertainment software. It doesn't actually
have to work. We have just the right tools for that!" I
picture off-the-shelf commercial software, an army of entry
level commercial programmers, and pointy-haired bosses who
were convinced that the combination would save time and money.
What could possibly go wrong?! Of course I'm just making this up.
I don't see fodder for language-war in this, but this sort of
of thing does bring out the armchair engineer in me. Could I
have done better? What combination of network, operating system
and applications software would have worked in 1997? 2010?
Sounds hard, in 1997 anyway .. they have my sympathy. I'ld
very much like to know what they're using now. A decade has
passed, lessons learned. We can safely assume that the
problems are solved. In that decade a whole new generation of
commercial aircraft has been designed. I found a few hints at
this site:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.740973.13

A few snippets:

   Earlier this year I was flying on Air France. They had
   quite a new in flight entertainment system with a much
   improved map. They rebooted the system at some point
   and on loading [it was] showing Windows CE messages ...
   doing some sort of network boot.
   Dan V

   Singapore Airlines was probably also running some variant
   of Windows for their in flight entertainment- they had
   to reboot it twice between Singapore and London. ;0)
   Andy Brice

   Re Windows CE, the other time I have managed to hang
   the Swiss's entertainment system by playing Solitaire,
   they rebooted my virtual machine and the good old X Window
   screen came up...
   Dimity Leskov

They say that if Bill Gates had a nickel for every time windows
crashed, he'ld be a billionaire.

Jonathan