Unbelievable story in the DailyTech a couple of days ago.
Seemingly six Lockheed F22 Raptor fighter jets on a flight from Hawaii to Japan were crippled when they flew over the International Date Line! Their computer systems were unable to cope and their computers crashed completely.
Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and partial communications were completely taken offline. Numerous attempts were made to “reboot” the systems to no avail.
If the weather hadn’t been as good as it was on the flight, there is a high probability they would all have been lost. Fortunately they all made it back to Hawaii where they made manual landings safely.
These planes cost $125+ million USD apiece. I hope the US government kept the receipt!
This sounds like an input error made before takeoff, compounded by the lead navigator failing to isolate a deviant inertial navigation system. The only way I could do this when flying multimillion dollar aircraft over water was to fail to respond correctly to at least two system challenges.
In all segments of aviation, pilot error causes more damage than systems failures.