Ada in Boeing 787
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From: jonathan on 4 Feb 2010 12:02 On Feb 4, 4:09 am, Jerry <lancebo...(a)qwest.net> wrote: > I have an engineer friend who is a long-time employee of Honeywell > Flight Systems who claims that the Boeing 787 does not use Ada ("It's > an old language"). My friend, as i recall, manages a project involving > the airplane's entertainment system which he says uses C and C++ ... I have clear memories of reading about this in the early years of in-flight entertainment systems. I think it was about 1997/8 .. some UK trade journal had a small article about a (very) major UK aerospace company that lost significant money that year entirely on cost overruns of a million line C/C++ in-flight entertainment system for (I think) the 777. Same article said that that year it delivered air flight control system software in Ada on time and under budget. I enjoyed that .. might have some small details wrong so I won't name names, but I remember the Ada v. C++ part of it clearly. I did some Googling myself. The following 1998 article from the New York Times seems consistent with my memory: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/19/business/entertainment-in-the-skies-glitches-still-hurting-video-with-wings.html?pagewanted=2 A quote (but, as they say, read the whole thing): Indeed, B/E Aerospace spent three years developing a top-line system for British Airways worth as much as $155 million before the airline finally abandoned the effort last fall after numerous delays. Northwest Airlines had a similar experience with Hughes-Avicom, a division of the giant Hughes Electronics unit of General Motors. And in 1996, United Airlines sued GEC-Marconi, a unit of the General Electric Company of Britain when it failed to deliver on its promises for an entertainment system designed for the first Boeing 777. (The two sides settled out of court last fall.) The biggest problem with those early systems was that they worked only 90 percent of the time, which meant that even on flights where the systems were offered only in first and business class, a half-dozen seats or more might have been out of order. The cynic in me pictures management types saying: "Oh good, its not flight control software. Its in-flight entertainment software. It doesn't actually have to work. We have just the right tools for that!" I picture off-the-shelf commercial software, an army of entry level commercial programmers, and pointy-haired bosses who were convinced that the combination would save time and money. What could possibly go wrong?! Of course I'm just making this up. I don't see fodder for language-war in this, but this sort of of thing does bring out the armchair engineer in me. Could I have done better? What combination of network, operating system and applications software would have worked in 1997? 2010? Sounds hard, in 1997 anyway .. they have my sympathy. I'ld very much like to know what they're using now. A decade has passed, lessons learned. We can safely assume that the problems are solved. In that decade a whole new generation of commercial aircraft has been designed. I found a few hints at this site: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.740973.13 A few snippets: Earlier this year I was flying on Air France. They had quite a new in flight entertainment system with a much improved map. They rebooted the system at some point and on loading [it was] showing Windows CE messages ... doing some sort of network boot. Dan V Singapore Airlines was probably also running some variant of Windows for their in flight entertainment- they had to reboot it twice between Singapore and London. ;0) Andy Brice Re Windows CE, the other time I have managed to hang the Swiss's entertainment system by playing Solitaire, they rebooted my virtual machine and the good old X Window screen came up... Dimity Leskov They say that if Bill Gates had a nickel for every time windows crashed, he'ld be a billionaire. Jonathan
From: MRE on 4 Feb 2010 13:32 On 4 Feb., 05:09, Jerry <lancebo...(a)qwest.net> wrote: > I have an engineer friend who is a long-time employee of Honeywell > Flight Systems who claims that the Boeing 787 does not use Ada ("It's > an old language"). My friend, as i recall, manages a project involving > the airplane's entertainment system which he says uses C and C++ and > not Ada. I don't doubt that his subsystem uses C but a bit of web > research seems to indicate that the flight systems use Ada. Who is > right--the web or my friend who works on the airplane? Your friend will probably know about SW on the seven-late-seven as I do about software on the A380. Though I'ven been working on the fat baby for almost five years, I can only tell you which language was used for the Doors and Slides Management System: C. Usually you just see the feet of the elephant in such a project. Interesting though, that the arguments against Ada are the same ones they were using at my old company: "We don't use Ada, it's old fashioned. We use C, which is much more modern!" Sigh! Does your friend also tell you, that you must not use object- orientation because "this is not deterministic" ? Sending regards while shaking my head, Marc
From: sjw on 4 Feb 2010 15:14 On Feb 4, 5:02 pm, jonathan <johns...(a)googlemail.com> wrote: > The cynic in me pictures management types saying: > "Oh good, its not flight control software. Its in-flight > entertainment software. It doesn't actually > have to work. We have just the right tools for that!" I > picture off-the-shelf commercial software, an army of entry > level commercial programmers, and pointy-haired bosses who > were convinced that the combination would save time and money. I know a little about one of these systems. The main problem IIRC was that the hardware was wildly underpowered and underresourced, with banked EEPROM, and there was something like a 10% chance that an in- situ software upgrade would brick the module. It may well have been written in C; I don't know if there was an RTOS, but if there was it most certainly wasn't Windows. The most problematic module was the Video-Audio Control Module, aka VACM; there was a rueful sign on the wall, "Nature abhors a VACM" :-)
From: Jerry on 4 Feb 2010 15:24
On Feb 4, 3:32 am, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...(a)ludovic-brenta.org> wrote: > On Feb 4, 5:09 am, Jerry <lancebo...(a)qwest.net> wrote: > > > I have an engineer friend who is a long-time employee of Honeywell > > Flight Systems who claims that the Boeing 787 does not use Ada ("It's > > an old language"). My friend, as i recall, manages a project involving > > the airplane's entertainment system which he says uses C and C++ and > > not Ada. I don't doubt that his subsystem uses C but a bit of web > > research seems to indicate that the flight systems use Ada. Who is > > right--the web or my friend who works on the airplane? > > Ada is in the Common Core system: > > http://www.adacore.com/2004/04/20/wind-river-teams-with-adacore-on-pl... > > Ada is in the air conditioning: > > http://www.adacore.com/2006/05/01/hamilton-sundstrand-selects-gnat-pr... > > Friends don't let friends program in C++. > > -- > Ludovic Brenta. Thanks, Ludovic. This was the sort of thing that I was looking for. I shouldn't have mentioned the "It's an old language" thing since that is a distraction from what I was wanting to know. Jerry |