Computer Crash At 30 Thousands Feet

[asian1]

I got a bad experience with Boeing 747 entertainment system of a major airlines, created by Rockwell Collins.

After several minutes playing games, the computer crashed and had to be re-booted. The Rockwell Collins logo appear, then ..... Microsoft MS-DOS Copyright Notice.

Does the airline use old, unreliable DOS on their entertainment system?
How often they have to re-boot the system during the flight?

What happen if the airlines use similar computer and OS as the main computer of the airplane?

[god64]

After several minutes playing games, the computer crashed and had to be re-booted. The Rockwell Collins logo appear, then ..... Microsoft MS-DOS Copyright Notice.

Does the airline use old, unreliable DOS on their entertainment system?
How often they have to re-boot the system during the flight?

do you think it would be better if they would run windows? i dont think so

What happen if the airlines use similar computer and OS as the main computer of the airplane?

just watch the news and you'll know

but don't worry, the pilot just have to press autopilot+gear+flaps to bring up the taskmanager to kill the explorer and everything should be fine... and if not, a modern plane should be capable of gliding as long as the reboot takes

[mr_a500]

That's nothing. I've heard from medical personnel at hospitals who said some vital medical computers now run Windows instead of custom software. The computers crash regularly now and take forever to reboot.

[Tigger]

All aircraft critical systems on Boeing commericial aircraft have to be tested to DO-178B Level B at least, DOS isnt an OS qualifed to any level of DO-178B, so its not used in any flight systems at all.   At this point only 3 OS's are actually qualified to DO-178B, everything else is hand written OS's like we did on the C130J's we delivered to Australia and every single line of it is inspected one at a time.  
    -Tig

[Amiduffer]

Man, haven't they heard about those Amiga 2000's at the Toronto Airport they've been using for 20 years with no problems. :laugh:

[keropi]

one thing that DOS is not, is unreliable... don't be so narrow minded...

[Waccoon]

Does the airline use old, unreliable DOS on their entertainment system?

That's right.  There's no memory protection, so if an app crashes, it's obviously the OS's fault.

I believe Mac users used the flip side of this excuse for over a decade.  They still do.

[PMC]

During 1999 I was flying that premier league carrier "Air Britannia" to Reus in Spain when the screen displaying the map of Europe over which we were flying suddenly went blank...

I was then greeted by our old friend the Guru!  Even Amigas crash at 30,000 feet.

[ACEFNQ]

Correct also one of the main OS' used in aviation is QNX.

ace

[Tigger]

PMC wrote:
During 1999 I was flying that premier league carrier "Air Britannia" to Reus in Spain when the screen displaying the map of Europe over which we were flying suddenly went blank...

I was then greeted by our old friend the Guru!  Even Amigas crash at 30,000 feet.

Toaster/Flyer in an A2000 (in fact it was one of those A2000s in my house at the moment) flew on the vomit comet, so it doesnt always fail at 30,000 ft.
      -Tig
     
   

[InTheSand]

Singapore Air's in-flight entertainment system runs a command-line-based Gameboy emulator that runs under either Windows NT or 2000. It crashed on me a couple of times on exiting it, bringing up an alert box saying "unable to read from drive D:" and the good ol' "retry, abort, cancel" buttons! Had to wait ten minutes for the session to reboot itself...

 - Ali