What the heck is going on here. Both planes with smell of smoke in the cockpits. Plane headed to DFW makes emergency landing NBC 5 / Associated Press Two MD-80 planes, including one headed to Dallas, made emergency landings on Monday. An American Airlines MD-80 headed to DFW was forced to land in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Monday. Flight 1216, bound for Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, had taken off at 4:55 p.m. and turned back at 5:03 p.m., airline spokeswoman Martha Pantin said in Fort Worth. ``There was a smell of smoke in the cockpit, Pantin said. Airline officials said 114 passengers and a crew of six safely walked off the plane at Albuquerque International Airport shortly after 5 p.m. The MD-80 is similar to the plane that crashed Jan. 31 offshore northwest of Los Angeles, killing 88 people aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 261.

A TWA MD-80 on its way to St. Louis returned back to San Antonio Monday after reports of smoke in the cabin. A spokesman says the trouble was traced to an air conditioning unit. None of the 121 passengers on board were hurt. Airlines were ordered Friday to inspect MD-80s after stabilizer jackscrew problems were found in the Alaska Airlines wreckage. But Pantin said Mondays problem here had nothing to do with the stabilizer. She said all of the more than 280 MD-80s and MD-90s American operates have been checked for jackscrew problems and cleared.

Firefighters and maintenance crews checked the plane after the unscheduled landing, according to Pantin and Albuquerque airport spokeswoman Maggie Santiago.

http://www.msnbc.com/local/KXAS/17794.asp#BODY

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 15, 2000

Answers

At least two of these MD-80 incidents occurred at Midnight, World Time (also called "Greenwich Mean Time": The actual crash, and this Albuquerque incident. Did the other MD-80 incidents occur at this time of day? (4pm PST, 5pm MST, 6pm CST, 7pm EST). If so, it is strong evidence that these problems are due to an embedded system output of a negative time interval error at a day roll, combined with the "00" in the year field. If so, then the Computer Century Date Bug is causing (at least a few) planes to fall out of the sky, and many other near misses.

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), February 22, 2000.