[einhverfr]

I can think of two likely possibilities. The plane might have disintegrated in midair (that is not necessarily intentional btw, and most midair breakups are bad maintenance), or something could have gone drastically wrong. For example this plane had a previously damaged wing. If something went south, it is possible that the plane could have ended up in a flat spin and crashed.

Another possibility is AIRDU failures leaving the plane to fly into the sea.

Before jumping to conclusions, you really need to read this piece in IEEE spectrum (I promise it isn't computer-generated nonsense): http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-dea...

[tzs]

From the IEEE article:

> The fault-tolerant ADIRU was designed to operate with a failed accelerometer (it has six). The redundant design of the ADIRU also meant that it wasn’t mandatory to replace the unit when an accelerometer failed.

This seems unwise to me. I could understand if the rule was that you could put off replacing a failed accelerometer until the next regular maintenance. If it is OK to simply never replace it, then why not just ship the plane with five and save money?

[einhverfr]

> I could understand if the rule was that you could put off replacing a failed accelerometer until the next regular maintenance.

I think that's the idea. Whether or not it is followed in practice is another matter, and testing further failures was not the priority it should have been.

[tarre]

Thanks for sharing the link. It was a very good read.