Planes run Windows!

Hey, forgot to mention it earlier, but planes run Windows it seems. My flight was delayed, and finally when it decided to take off, they admitted to having computer difficulties. The Airshow kept on crashing and rebooting, it was not even funny. I saw something.exe crash – the .exe bit made everything all that more interesting. I just feel a whole lot less safer flying nowadays… imagine Windows crashing, and not rebooting? Anyone know what the planes *really* run?

4 Comments

  1. Ruben says:

    Well. For MAS, they use this software called Select Plus. It has nintendo games, so i am
    guessing it is based on linux or some other open source software. And it does not look
    Windows-y at all. Not colourful (very linux-y). FAA says Customs use this – http://www.hf.faa.gov/docs/508/docs/cami/0308.pdf. And they mention Microsoft Systems Management Server 2.0: Hardware and Software Inventory 2.0. But for the plane internals they must have their own customised
    software. Could even be based on Tron?? Who knows.

  2. Anonymous says:

    The plane internals vary, the core is something called a “Flight Management System”, and at least one of the major suppliers of this equipment (Honeywell Avionics) uses VxWorks RTOS to run it. I would be very shocked to see any non-embedded OSes being used for this, and given the age of the industry, there probably isn’t much (if any) embedded Linux in this space right now.

  3. byte says:

    Well, I guess the Airshow runs Windows. I saw an .exe crash!

  4. Anonymous says:

    The plane internals vary, the core is something called a “Flight Management System”, and at least one of the major suppliers of this equipment (Honeywell Avionics) uses VxWorks RTOS to run it. I would be very shocked to see any non-embedded OSes being used for this, and given the age of the industry, there probably isn't much (if any) embedded Linux in this space right now.


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