The Overlooked "Gust of Wind" Use Case

The Gnat is a General Atomics UAV designed by LSI in the 80's and initially deployed by Turkish military and later to the Balkans for use by the CIA and others. Wikipedia relays a report that a Gnat 750 crashed during tests:

". . . when it was hit by a gust of wind, causing it to indicate zero airspeed. The UAV's software decided that meant it had landed and shut down the engine, causing the Gnat to fall to earth."

Some accounts indicate that several GNATs are still in use in Iraq.

Barracuda UAV Crash Due to Software

A joint Germany - Spain UAV venture managed by contractor EADS suffered a fatal setback in 2006 when it lost its prototype Barracuda vehicle due to a software failure. In 2007, EADS announced it would probably not build another.

Google's Outage and Press Repercussions

It was only a few hours before savage reports of Google's monocultural dominance emerged. These were a fallout from Google's erroneous flagging of most web sites as containing malware. As reported by ZDNet and again here, the Google Safe Browsing API returned incorrect results that resulted in blocking access to many internet sites. True, the outage lasted only 10 minutes or less, but it undermined the confidence many have in trusting a single provider with internet search.