Military
- The software error of a MIM-104 Patriot, caused its system clock to drift by one third of a second – resulting in failure to locate and intercept an incoming missile. The Iraqi missile impacted in a military compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (February 25, 1991), killing 28 Americans.
- A Chinook crash on Mull of Kintyre in June 1994. A Royal Air Force Chinook helicopter crashed into the Mull of Kintyre, killing 29. This was initially dismissed as pilot error, but an investigation by Computer Weekly uncovered sufficient evidence to convince a House of Lords inquiry that it may have been caused by a software bug in the aircraft's engine control computer.
- Smart ship USS Yorktown was left dead in the water in 1997 for nearly 3 hours after a divide by zero error.
- In April 1992 the first F-22 Raptor crashed while landing at Edwards Air Force Base, California. The cause of the crash was found to be a flight control software error that failed to prevent a pilot-induced oscillation.
- While attempting its first overseas deployment to the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, on 11 February 2007, a group of six F-22 Raptors flying from Hickam AFB, Hawaii, experienced multiple computer crashes coincident with their crossing of the 180th meridian of longitude (the International Date Line). The computer failures included at least navigation (completely lost) and communication. The fighters were able to return to Hawaii by following their tankers, something that might have been problematic had the weather not been good. The error was fixed within 48 hours, allowing a delayed deployment.
Read more about this topic: List Of Software Bugs
Famous quotes containing the word military:
“War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)
“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)