Thanks to Noam Rathaus for the tip: The U.S. Navy's Yorktown "Smart Ship," an Aegis missile cruiser that's being used as a pilot program for computer controlled naval vessels, was left adrift at sea for over two hours earlier this month because of problems with its Windows NT-based software. The ship had to be towed back to harbor for the third time because of database errors.
Officials confirmed that the Yorktown experienced an "engineering local area network casualty,” though they stopped short of blaming Windows NT on the problem. Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk says that "using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor.” DiGiorgio, who is a self-described whistle-blower, says these kinds of problems would be deadly in a combat situation
