alt Hacker NewsThe live feed buries the only useful information at the very bottom of the article:
> The plane manufacturer says it has found that intense radiation from the Sun could corrupt data crucial to flight controls.
> It’s thought most will be able to undergo a simple software update.
> The issue was discovered after a JetBlue aircraft en-route from Mexico to the United States in October experienced a ‘sudden drop in altitude’.
> The plane made an emergency landing, with reports at the time suggesting 15 to 20 people suffered minor injuries.
> It’s thought the incident was caused by intense solar radiation, which corrupted data in a computer used to help control the aircraft.
Replies
The software update is actually a rollback, apparently.
https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/669424-airbus-a320-recal...
I'd like to see a more technical article on this. Airbus has triple redundancy in the flight control computers.[1] And they're different CPUs - one AMD, one Intel, one Motorola, all doing the same job. If flight was disrupted, they should have had lots of alarms.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26587285_Challenges...
Interesting how radiation issues could be solved in software.
i wonder how definitive that is and how well they were able to reproduce the issue under controlled conditions and how strong the evidence is that there was particularly strong solar radiation in play. it would probably be a good thing if they published technical details for investigations like this that impact public safety.
i believe it could be solar radiation, but i also believe that solar radiation could be a catch-all for unexplained phenomena.
Note that the software update (it actually looks like a roll-back to an older version?) will only fix 4,500 newer aircraft, another older 2,000 (not sure what these are, they can't be pre-NEO, the ratios seem wrong?) will also need a hardware fix.
and
> But EasyJet says it has already completed the required software update and is planning on operating its flights as normal on Saturday
I'm amazed airlines haven't put up press releases detailing what is happening with their fleets yet. It has been a few hours so presumably they know and in the US at least this is a crazy busy weekend for travel.
Also: > The radiation corrupted data in the ELAC - a computer used to operate control surfaces on the wings and horizontal stabilizer.
On the Qantas 72 flight (2008), the ATSB report showed the same power spike that upset the ADIRU also left tidy 1-word corruptions in the flight data recorder. Those aligned with the clock cycle, shared the same amplitude and were confined to single ARINC words. That is pretty much exactly the signature of a failing solid state relay or contactor on the shared avionics power bus (upstream of both FDR and fly by wire).
Radation-driven bit flips would be Poisson distributed in time and energy. So that is one way to find out