Ariane 5 maiden flight failed due to unchecked software conversion from Ariane 4.

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Europe's Ariane 5 rocket self-destructed 40 seconds after its inaugural launch on June 4, 1996. An inquiry board found the failure originated in the inertial system's software, which was reused from the Ariane 4 rocket. A specific data value, related to horizontal velocity, overflowed during a conversion to a 16-bit integer. Engineers had left this conversion unprotected based on assumptions valid for Ariane 4's flight profile. However, Ariane 5's faster acceleration caused the value to exceed its limits, triggering a fatal error.

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