Was it the software?

That reminds me of how I was waiting in a Lockheed L1011 TriStar, for an Indian Airlines Airbus A320 Aircraft to land at Hullule airport in the Maldives on a clear day with light winds and suddenly the A320 discontinued the landing approach and went around. The Control Tower then asked why this A320 was going around. Its pilot said, "I don't know it is going around by itself!!"Yes, those were the days the Indian pilots were coming to grips with the A320. They even went on strike saying that the A320 was unsafe. Today, it is one of the safest aircraft in the market.

- BY CAPT. G A FERNANDO RCyAF/ SLAF, Air Ceylon, Air Lanka, SIA and SriLankan Airlines

On January 17, 2019, an All Nippon Airways (ANA) Boeing 787 Dreamliner suffered a simultaneous dual engine failure after touchdown at Osaka. They were flying in from Tokyo.

In the engine of the B787, there are many monitoring and controlling systems built into the Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC) such as the Electronic Engine Control (EEC) and the Thrust Control Malfunction Accommodation (TCMA). Unlike the pre FlyBy- Wire aircraft, there is no direct link with the control switches in the flight deck and the engine controls via steel cables and pulleys. Instead it is electrical signals that communicates the action to the engine controls. Thus, saving weight and therefore, fuel. The ANA technical team that was dispatched from Tokyo could not find anything wrong with the engines. Subsequently, Boeing issued a service bulletin to all Boeing B787 operators addressing a problem with the TCMA, which may have shut down both engines as a precaution since the Air/ Ground sensor switch did not effectively change over 'ground' mode before full reverse thrust was selected by the pilots too quickly and was detected as a fault. The Air/ Ground sensor switch (also known as the squat switch) which detect the aircraft weight on wheels was slow to recognise that the aircraft was firmly on the ground and assumed the aircraft was still airborne and when the full revers thrust was selected by the pilots, the aircraft presumed that maximum engine power was used while still in the air and shut the engines down. The reverse thrust diverts the exhaust forwards but does not reverse the direction of rotation of the engines.