On the 5th of June, an Eclipse 500 was about to land when it experienced a windshear. The pilot applied full power to counteract it. After touchdown, the plane accelerated, with both engines delivering full power, and the crew was forced to take-off again.

Both engines were still delivering full power, and both FADECs were reporting failure. The Quick Reference Handbook (QRH) do not mention procedures for a double FADEC failure, but says that if a FADEC is failed, the corresponding engine must be shut down.

The crew decided to shut the right engine down. After that, the left engine stopped delivering thrust, remaining at idle power, whatever the throttle position. The crew achieved to land, kudos for that, and this hopefully happened in VMC conditions.

Each FADEC is made of two channels, and if one fails the second one takes over. If both fail, parameters are taken from the other engine. If the other engine FADEC is also failed, the last known parameters are kept. As both FADECs failed simultaneously, the engines continued to deliver maximal thrust. After the right engine was stopped, its FADEC was no longer reporting failure, so the left engine FADEC “copied” its parameters, leading to idle thrust.

The system behaved as designed, and if it allows for more redundancy that classical (electro-mechanical) systems, in that particular case, it failed almost completely. The open question is why pushing the throttles to a full forward position causes a double FADEC failure..

On request of the NTSB, Eclipse did upgrade the AFM and QRH to inlcude a procedure to handle such an even, and the FAA mandated an inspection of the throttle assembly of all Eclipse 500 aircraft. Read more from Eclipe, and from NTSB.

The problem could be reproduced (on the ground), and the FAA issued an airworthiness directive requiring an inspection of all Eclipse 500 aircraft before their next flight, and inclusion of the new procedures in AFM and QRH. This inspection can be performed by the pilots themselves, and simply requires to turn electrical power on and push the throttles forward, looking for any FADEC alert