A Philosophy of Software Design

[Walter Bright]

On 6/28/2026 1:09 AM, Forum User wrote:
> Air France 447? They were not broken but some were clogged and
> the speed returned differed. If the computer could magically
> have diagnosed which of the tubes "were broken" it could have
> simply excluded the "broken" from the air speed computation.

It was Birgenair Flight 301. The investigators guessed that the pitot tubes were 
blocked, but could not confirm it because they could not recover them.

Nevertheless, the pitot tube on takeoff gave an indicated speed of 0. This 
should have been enough to trigger a nan.

In general, the computer monitoring the instruments should be able to detect 
when one instrument is bad, simply because its reading is inconsistent with the 
other state of the airplane.