Description
The Airbus
A340 is a long-haul aircraft that includes a critical fly-by-wire
flight control system that mediates pilot commands and controls
flight surface actuators. This is a development of the first
fly-by-wire system which was introduced in the Airbus A320
aircraft. It is of particular interest because of the approach
used for hardware and software redundancy.
There
is an excellent description of this system in Safety-Critical
Computer Systems , Neil Storey. Addison Wesley,
1996.
Use in teaching
I
use this example to supplement a lecture on fault-tolerent system
architectures. It also illustrates how fault-tolerant systems
must use multi-level redundancy to be safe.
Related chapters
Chapter
15: Real-time systems design
Chapter 20: Critical systems development
Supporting
documents
General
information on Airbus A340 aircraft
Overview
of flight control system
My Powerpoint
presentation prepared from the case study in Storey's book
that give an overview of the A340 system. Download PDF versions
from here.
System
specification Part 1- Airbus 330/340 FCS
System specification Part 2- Airbus
330/340 FCS
More
detailed information on the Airbus A340 FCS - from a course
given at the University of Twente.
Report
on RISKS of problems with A340 system
Problems
were experienced on landing an A340 at Heathrow Airport
London. This is a brief discussion of these problems and
the causes that were identified in the subsequent incident
report. The plane landed safely.
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