Flights disrupted after Airbus discovers intense sun radiation could impact flight control data
Flights disrupted after Airbus discovers intense sun radiation could impact flight control data
Flights disrupted after Airbus discovers intense sun radiation could impact flight control data
If anyone has an article with more technical details on what the solar radiation did, and how they're going to patch it, I'd like to read about it :)
Airbus said it discovered the issue after an investigation into an incident in which a plane flying between the US and Mexico suddenly lost altitude in October.
The JetBlue Airways flight made an emergency landing in Florida after at least 15 people were injured.
The problem identified with A320 aircrafts relates to a piece of computing software which calculates a plane's elevation.
Airbus discovered that, at high altitudes, its data could be corrupted by intense radiation released periodically by the Sun.
The A320 family are what is known as "fly by wire" planes. This means there is no direct mechanical link between the controls in the cockpit and the parts of the aircraft that actually govern flight, with the pilot's actions processed by a computer.
Not sure about a specific article for planes, but some forms of solar radiation can cause random bits to flip to the opposite when it crosses through computer hardware like memory.
These randomly occur already just by us existing in the solar system, and error correction algorithms, hardware like ECC memory, and shielding helps to prevent and correct these issues when they do happen. The intense radiation recently, the same that caused the extended auroras, caused more and stronger occurrences though.
One flight we know was affected despite systems that help prevent issues like that, so they're having the software reloaded on every plane that might have been affected.
In my previous work we had a bunch of devices that failed at the final installation. All of them passed that test at the end of line at the plant without any issues but they simply refused to boot at the customer site. When we read the ROM contents some data was corrupted We had a very extensive investigation and finally they realized that all the ones that failed had been flown instead of using ground shipping and there had been some solar activity so the final conclusion was bit shift due to solar storm and since fixing was to difficult and expensive it was just decided to stop shipping this particular device by air (it used a very cheap flash memory)
Basically I can confirm this.
Depending on the used hardware, the hard- and software is able to detect and correct these so called “softerrors” or bit flips in the volatile memory (RAM) of a computing system. In our products we have the exact same problem and it depends on the complexity (and at the end on the price $$$) how affected the product is by this physical effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset?wprov=sfti1