The Chinook incident and safety-critical software

Karl Schneider, Editorial Director, Computer Weekly

Wednesday 6th October 2004, 6:30 pm (refreshments available from 6:10 pm)

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society, 36 York Place, Edinburgh EH1 3HU (street map)

On Friday 2 June 1994 an RAF Chinook helicopter crashed into the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, Killing all 29 people on board, including some of the most senior personnel in the intelligence services in Northern Ireland.

An investigation found no evidence of a serious technical failure. Largely because of this, following an RAF board of enquiry two senior officers blamed the pilots, convicting them posthumously of gross negligence.

But in the years since the crash new evidence emerged, much of it uncovered by Computer Weekly, which has thrown doubt on the safety of the verdict and persuaded the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee and a House of Lords Select Committee to call for it to be overturned.

The information uncovered since the crash has worrying implications for the accountability of suppliers of safety-critical software.

About the speaker

Karl Schneider is Editorial Director of Computer Weekly, the world's oldest weekly IT publication and the best-read IT magazine in the UK, and its online service computerweekly.com.

Karl has been with Computer Weekly for nine years. During that time the magazine has won a host of awards, including the titles "Business Magazine of the Year" and "Campaigning Magazine of the Year" (three times) at the Periodical Publishers Association awards, the Oscars of magazine publishing.

Karl has been a business and technology journalist for 16 years, covering sectors ranging from utilities to electronics and computing. He makes frequent appearances on TV and radio talking about computers and the Internet.

Before becoming a journalist Karl was a research physicist, working on nuclear fusion at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham Laboratory in Oxfordshire. It was here in the early 1980s that he had his first serious experience of computers and the Internet, writing programs in Fortran on PDP-11, Vax and Prime computers.

Karl is a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, a member of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (FRSA). He is married with three boys.