14 DAY TRIAL // The Electronic Control Unit (ECU) in Airbus A400M military cargo aircraft may suffer from a bug that could be at the root of the deadly crash involving such a plane that occurred on May 9 outside Seville, Spain, a short while after the unit took off.
Airbus released an alert on Tuesday urging operators of the airplane to run checks of the ECU embedded system that is also responsible for engine control.
Airbus discovered glitch independently
The company says that the operators have received instructions for carrying out specific verifications of the unit. The bug in the software may have been related to the accident in Spain, as the findings of the potential risks in ECU have been shared with the official investigation team.
“The AOT [Alert Operator Transmission] requires Operators to perform one-time specific checks of the Electronic Control Units (ECU) on each of the aircraft’s engines before next flight and introduces additional detailed checks to be carried out in the event of any subsequent engine or ECU replacement,” reads the statement from Airbus.
The discovery of the cause for the potential ECU malfunction was made via Airbus Defense and Space’s internal analysis, independently of the current investigation of the accident that caused the death of four people, including two test pilots.
Fuel supply may have been cut off and then re-enabled
According to Aviation Week, the new ECU software may have interrupted fuel supply to the engines, causing the plane to crash at its first flight.
Sources say that the fuel supply was re-established, but achieving a safe flight condition was no longer possible.
After the accident, several countries, including Germany, Turkey and the UK held the aircrafts to the ground. France did not make this decision for any of its six aircrafts.
Information from flight recorder devices has been sent for analysis, but there are compatibility issues that delay downloading the data.