In aviation, a “tail strike” is an unlucky incident by which a airplane’s tail actually strikes the runway, the bottom, or one other stationary object. Usually, such episodes will happen throughout take off or touchdown and, sometimes, they’re not thought of harmful. Nevertheless, that’s not all the time the case, and so they have been recognized to trigger actual injury to planes.

Properly, right here’s some lower than comforting information: earlier this week, it was reported {that a} weird incident had occurred at Seattle-Tacoma Worldwide Airport in late January. Through the incident, two tail strikes occurred on the identical morning, solely minutes aside—each involving Boeing plane operated by Alaska Airways. The incident grounded each flights and compelled a short lived shutdown of Alaska’s flight exercise nationwide.

Horrifyingly, investigators have now found {that a} software program glitch was chargeable for the incident. In keeping with the Seattle Instances, the tailstrikes occurred largely as the results of a bug in a program offered by a Swedish agency referred to as DynamicSource. This system is meant to ship “essential weight and steadiness information” that pilots enter into their flight computer systems to assist decide stuff like “how a lot thrust the engines will present and at what pace the jet can be able to raise off.” On this case, the device delivered defective information that “severely undervalued [the] weights for the airplanes.” The Instances experiences:

…the information [delivered] was on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 kilos gentle. With the whole weight of these jets at 150,000 to 170,000 kilos, the error was sufficient to skew the engine thrust and pace settings. Each planes headed down the runway with much less energy and at decrease pace than they need to have. And with the jets judged lighter than they really had been, the pilots rotated too early.

Gizmodo reached out to Alaska Airways for extra data and can replace this story in the event that they reply.

Just about everyone is a little afraid of flying. Why wouldn’t you be? You’re being shot throughout the sky in a metallic tube, tens of hundreds of ft within the air. Regardless of every part we all know in regards to the statistics, that complete scenario simply doesn’t precisely scream “protected.” Nonetheless, understanding the backend digital infrastructure the airline trade is sufficient to make you wish to journey by Megabus for the remainder of your life.