7 ms·

Airbus A320 Fly by wire corrupted by radiation in flight

113 points by JohannMac 10mo ago

JohannMac 10mo ago
Caused uncommanded pitch down, could exceed structural integrity of aircraft. There are redundant units - unknown why this can happen given redundancy.
- mertd 10mo ago
  Also not very clear how they attributed the failure to solar radiation.
  - belter 10mo ago
    These have specific error/data spike patterns. This document as of page 133 as good example of such investigation and conclusions: https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao2008070.pdf https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
    - RealityVoid 10mo ago
      It's an interesting document, but I am unconvinced that data spikes mean environmental radiation driven data corruption. The fact that they have a certain pattern suggests it's not random. They certainly do put a chapter with potential triggers down there, and it's a good take, you can't just discard the possibility. But above, they also have SW bugs as a potential trigger, so... Essentially, they don't know for sure yet.
      - kergonath 10mo ago
        > But above, they also have SW bugs as a potential trigger, so They also did extensive tests and analyses and came to the conclusion that a bug was highly unlikely (they would never say that something is impossible, but it still is exceedingly improbable). > Essentially, they don't know for sure yet. That’s not a really fair assessment. Their conclusion is that they could not estimate the likelihood of a radiation effect, so in that sense they don’t know for sure. But they still eliminated a lot of options. Almost all of them, actually.
        deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
        RealityVoid 10mo ago
        I think it's a quite fair assessment. It's not an indictment of their engineering or anything, but they can't say for sure what caused the issue and the analyzed all they could. The conclusion is "we don't know, we have some guesses". Probably it irks me the most because "cosmic rays" are impossible to prove. It's the perfect scapegoat. If I had a penny every time that someone put it out as the possible cause of a bug... I'd still be poor, but... well, I'd have a couple of pennies. EDIT: On a deeper read, I am inclined to be a bit more charitable to this theory because, to my surprise: "As noted in section 3.5.2, the CPU module on units 4167 and 4122 did not incorporate EDAC" I did not consider these units were _this_ old, so they did not have error correction on them. Nowadays, most every MCU has ECC on them. So, yes, without ECC the odds are quite larger that they DID get a "bit flip"
  - RealityVoid 10mo ago
    In my humble opinion, whenever someone dropped the idea... "Maybe it's solar radiation" it never was solar radiation. There was a subtle bug in the system or something. It's just such a cop-out to attribute it to, solar radiation, it's our profession's variant of magic.
    - netsharc 10mo ago
      https://www.computer-dictionary-online.org/definitions-c/cosmic-rays https://www.computer-dictionary-online.org/definitions-c/cos...
      - pixl97 10mo ago
        I can't find any further information on this intel testing like what altitude they perform the tests at. AMD has perform testing at data centers of different altitudes and there is some statistical significance in SRAM error rates. And that is typically only around 5000-6000 ft msl. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2503210.2503257 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2503210.2503257 Planes are much higher than that in operation so get larger amounts of unfiltered solar flux. This may be one of the causes of higher cancer rates in pilots, but eliminating other environmental causes may be difficult https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/aviation/prevention/aircrew-cancer.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/aviation/prevention/aircrew-cancer...
  - wat10000 10mo ago
    I don’t think they did. Their analysis indicates that it could, and this analysis happened as part of an investigation of an incident, but they don’t say that was definitely the cause of that incident.
  - araes 10mo ago
    CGMthrowaway has an interesting comment on the other thread about this subject, that it's likely not solar radiation. "failing solid state relay or contactor on the shared avionics power bus" [1] Related to the previous 2008 incident on Qantas 72 that had similar characteristics. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083560 > 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
- F7F7F7 10mo ago
  Presumably the same affected units are part of the redundancy package. The article essentially says as much.
belter 10mo ago
Emergency Airworthiness Directive 2025-0268-E: https://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/2025-0268-E https://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/2025-0268-E https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/EASA_AD_2025_0268_E.pdf/EAD_2025-0268-E_1 https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/EASA_AD_2025_0268_E.pdf/EAD_2... This was the incident that triggered the investigation: https://avherald.com/h?article=52f1ffc3&opt=0 https://avherald.com/h?article=52f1ffc3&opt=0 https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/30/us/jetblue-flight-emergency-landing-florida https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/30/us/jetblue-flight-emergen... List of Airbus A320 family operators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320_family_operators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320_family_ope...
- bgwalter 10mo ago
  According to the airworthiness directive: Affected ELAC: Elevator aileron computer (ELAC) ELAC B L104 Serviceable ELAC: ELAC B L103+ So it's a regression that affects decades old aircraft. Of course Airbus is now also meddling with "AI": https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/digital-transformation/artificial-intelligence https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/digital-transformation/... Obviously there no direct connection here, but it seems that destabilizing perfectly working aircraft could be the product of a culture shift.
  - mosura 10mo ago
    From what I have heard of how much Airbus pay people . . “Much” is the wrong word.
  - kergonath 10mo ago
    > Obviously there no direct connection here, but it seems that destabilizing perfectly working aircraft could be the product of a culture shift. A culture shift following a fad in the last couple of years that caused "a regression" (whatever you mean by that) in an aircraft that was made years before, and that was designed years before again? How would that work? They can stop selling aircrafts if they have a time machine.
    - bgwalter 10mo ago
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
Airbus issues major A320 recall after flight-control incident https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-issues-major-a320-recall-after-flight-control-incident-2025-11-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-is... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081628)
userbinator 10mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset Apparently it has happened to an Airbus once before.
- belter 10mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao2008070.pdf https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
- ashleyn 10mo ago
  Why do I get the feeling both of these are a diagnosis of exclusion, and there's not particularly any hard evidence that radiation is causing these uncommanded manoeuvres? How unlikely is it for Airbus models specifically to be vulnerable to radiation-induced data corruption twice in almost twenty years? Are there similar incidents recorded for Boeing jets?
lysace 10mo ago
So the patch will be physical, I imagine. ("Apply this very expensive special tape from (e.g.) 3M here and here.")
- SteveNuts 10mo ago
  I believe most A320s can do OTA software updates (including dowgrades)
  - lxgr 10mo ago
    OTA? That sounds extremely implausible.
    - sam1714 10mo ago
      It's a thing, but it's not universal on the A320. Original 1984 critical hardware: the box has an EEPROM module, you swap it on the plane. FMS (which requires monthly nav data updates) and all modern hardware: the box can be updated over the ARINC 429 serial bus or Ethernet (newer systems/planes), called dataloading Dataloading had different methods. A320s through the 2000's, most airlines had a 3.5 floppy disk drive on board (Airbus FDDU), and a mechanic fed floppies in. It was slow. Evolution of that was a USB port that took a flash drive. Most current planes of older models just got rid of on-board dataloading. The mechanic uses a laptop with a cable or purpose-built tablet and plugs into a port. The mechanic can download the software via Wi-Fi or cellular onto the device: https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/hardware-systems/portable-dataloaders https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/hardware-systems/p... Airlines can indeed buy a on-board box that connects to Wi-Fi and LTE at the gate which downloads software. This is standard for the latest models that produce more data (A350, 787), but optional for older models. The mechanic still needs to go to the plane and push the buttons to tell it to load. https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/dataloading/eadl-xs https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/dataloading/eadl-x... https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/hardware-systems/groundlink-comm+ https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/hardware-systems/g...
      - 10mo ago
sxp 10mo ago
The title sounds like speculative clickbait. From https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-11-airbus-update-on-a320-family-precautionary-fleet-action https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-11-ai...: Analysis of a recent event involving an A320 Family aircraft has revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls. This is different from the core claim that the incident was caused by radiation. What are the prior probabilities that the system was exposed to "intense radiation"? Vs some other mundane cause such as a faulty wire or mechanical issues? And what is the evidence supporting the former hypothesis?
- kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
  > What are the prior probabilities 100% for electronics operating at altitude. Also on the ground, but we mostly act like it doesn't happen and are usually ignorant of the root cause when it does.
  - RealityVoid 10mo ago
    100% of what? Those things have ECC and redundancy to the hilt. The data corruption odds are real and higher than one would expect but still not very high.
    - belter 10mo ago
      Look at pag 138...and correlation with altitude...: https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao2008070.pdf https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
      - RealityVoid 10mo ago
        Yes, look at page 135 as well. They don't know, they have educated guesses. It could be SW, it could be hw. EMI causing bugs is the equivalent of "bad juju".
        deleted 10mo ago
t0mas88 10mo ago
This is highly unusual, so there may be something more to it than only speculation about radiation. The emergency AD says: > Before next flight after the effective date of this AD, replace or modify each affected ELAC with a serviceable ELAC in accordance with the instructions of the AOT. > > A ferry flight (up to 3 Flight Cycles, non-ETOPS, no passengers) is permitted to position the aeroplane to a location where the replacement or modification can be accomplished. That's a very limiting AD. The "before the next flight" part is unusual, ADs often have a limit to the next inspection or X flight hours or similar, not immediately.
- mosura 10mo ago
  Is some major new solar activity imminently expected that explains the urgency?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
thisislife2 10mo ago
I can understand why this would be priority for Airbus even without the incident of a flight losing altitude - recently read that a major philosophical difference between Airbus and Boeing is that Airbus prioritises the safety of the Aircraft through controls (hardware and software) where as Boeing believes a human should always be the final decision maker and be able to over ride any control. An Airbus rarely allows a pilot to over ride any warning or allow the pilot to exceed the specifications of the aircraft, whereas a Boeing will warn the pilot about an unsafe action but will allow the pilot to over ride it. It will be interesting to see how things change when AI tech creeps into Aviation tech.
- croes 10mo ago
  Didn’t workout with the Boeing 737 Max, did it?
  - userbinator 10mo ago
    That was basically the first Boeing that went in the Airbus direction.
    - lxgr 10mo ago
      Crucially, while trying to convince everyone that it’s basically the same old 737 to save on pilot retraining costs, nevermind the significantly larger engines. Airbus is much more transparent about its automation. Pilots even learn about the procedure to fly an A320 with a complete fly-by-wire outage using only mechanical emergency elevator controls and differential thrust.
      - cpgxiii 10mo ago
        > Airbus is much more transparent about its automation. Airbus is OK, but could be better. There is a long history of Airbus crews facing unexpected corner cases in their flight control laws, and fortunately only a few of them have had fatal outcomes. While there are only a few "major" modes, there are a surprisingly large number of edge cases that can be encountered.
sfink 10mo ago
So it's called the Icarus bug, right? Please tell me they're calling it the Icarus bug.
- fleroviumna 10mo ago
  [dead]

113 points by JohannMac 10mo ago

Caused uncommanded pitch down, could exceed structural integrity of aircraft. There are redundant units - unknown why this can happen given redundancy.

mertd 10mo ago
Also not very clear how they attributed the failure to solar radiation.
- belter 10mo ago
  These have specific error/data spike patterns. This document as of page 133 as good example of such investigation and conclusions: https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao2008070.pdf https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
  - RealityVoid 10mo ago
    It's an interesting document, but I am unconvinced that data spikes mean environmental radiation driven data corruption. The fact that they have a certain pattern suggests it's not random. They certainly do put a chapter with potential triggers down there, and it's a good take, you can't just discard the possibility. But above, they also have SW bugs as a potential trigger, so... Essentially, they don't know for sure yet.
    - kergonath 10mo ago
      > But above, they also have SW bugs as a potential trigger, so They also did extensive tests and analyses and came to the conclusion that a bug was highly unlikely (they would never say that something is impossible, but it still is exceedingly improbable). > Essentially, they don't know for sure yet. That’s not a really fair assessment. Their conclusion is that they could not estimate the likelihood of a radiation effect, so in that sense they don’t know for sure. But they still eliminated a lot of options. Almost all of them, actually.
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      - RealityVoid 10mo ago
        I think it's a quite fair assessment. It's not an indictment of their engineering or anything, but they can't say for sure what caused the issue and the analyzed all they could. The conclusion is "we don't know, we have some guesses". Probably it irks me the most because "cosmic rays" are impossible to prove. It's the perfect scapegoat. If I had a penny every time that someone put it out as the possible cause of a bug... I'd still be poor, but... well, I'd have a couple of pennies. EDIT: On a deeper read, I am inclined to be a bit more charitable to this theory because, to my surprise: "As noted in section 3.5.2, the CPU module on units 4167 and 4122 did not incorporate EDAC" I did not consider these units were _this_ old, so they did not have error correction on them. Nowadays, most every MCU has ECC on them. So, yes, without ECC the odds are quite larger that they DID get a "bit flip"
- RealityVoid 10mo ago
  In my humble opinion, whenever someone dropped the idea... "Maybe it's solar radiation" it never was solar radiation. There was a subtle bug in the system or something. It's just such a cop-out to attribute it to, solar radiation, it's our profession's variant of magic.
  - netsharc 10mo ago
    https://www.computer-dictionary-online.org/definitions-c/cosmic-rays https://www.computer-dictionary-online.org/definitions-c/cos...
    - pixl97 10mo ago
      I can't find any further information on this intel testing like what altitude they perform the tests at. AMD has perform testing at data centers of different altitudes and there is some statistical significance in SRAM error rates. And that is typically only around 5000-6000 ft msl. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2503210.2503257 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2503210.2503257 Planes are much higher than that in operation so get larger amounts of unfiltered solar flux. This may be one of the causes of higher cancer rates in pilots, but eliminating other environmental causes may be difficult https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/aviation/prevention/aircrew-cancer.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/aviation/prevention/aircrew-cancer...
- wat10000 10mo ago
  I don’t think they did. Their analysis indicates that it could, and this analysis happened as part of an investigation of an incident, but they don’t say that was definitely the cause of that incident.
- araes 10mo ago
  CGMthrowaway has an interesting comment on the other thread about this subject, that it's likely not solar radiation. "failing solid state relay or contactor on the shared avionics power bus" [1] Related to the previous 2008 incident on Qantas 72 that had similar characteristics. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083560 > 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
F7F7F7 10mo ago
Presumably the same affected units are part of the redundancy package. The article essentially says as much.

belter 10mo ago

Emergency Airworthiness Directive 2025-0268-E: https://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/2025-0268-E https://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/2025-0268-E https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/EASA_AD_2025_0268_E.pdf/EAD_2025-0268-E_1 https://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/EASA_AD_2025_0268_E.pdf/EAD_2... This was the incident that triggered the investigation: https://avherald.com/h?article=52f1ffc3&opt=0 https://avherald.com/h?article=52f1ffc3&opt=0 https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/30/us/jetblue-flight-emergency-landing-florida https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/30/us/jetblue-flight-emergen... List of Airbus A320 family operators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320_family_operators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A320_family_ope...

bgwalter 10mo ago
According to the airworthiness directive: Affected ELAC: Elevator aileron computer (ELAC) ELAC B L104 Serviceable ELAC: ELAC B L103+ So it's a regression that affects decades old aircraft. Of course Airbus is now also meddling with "AI": https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/digital-transformation/artificial-intelligence https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/digital-transformation/... Obviously there no direct connection here, but it seems that destabilizing perfectly working aircraft could be the product of a culture shift.
- mosura 10mo ago
  From what I have heard of how much Airbus pay people . . “Much” is the wrong word.
- kergonath 10mo ago
  > Obviously there no direct connection here, but it seems that destabilizing perfectly working aircraft could be the product of a culture shift. A culture shift following a fad in the last couple of years that caused "a regression" (whatever you mean by that) in an aircraft that was made years before, and that was designed years before again? How would that work? They can stop selling aircrafts if they have a time machine.
  - bgwalter 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago

Airbus issues major A320 recall after flight-control incident https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-issues-major-a320-recall-after-flight-control-incident-2025-11-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-is... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081628)

userbinator 10mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset Apparently it has happened to an Airbus once before.

belter 10mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72 https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao2008070.pdf https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
ashleyn 10mo ago
Why do I get the feeling both of these are a diagnosis of exclusion, and there's not particularly any hard evidence that radiation is causing these uncommanded manoeuvres? How unlikely is it for Airbus models specifically to be vulnerable to radiation-induced data corruption twice in almost twenty years? Are there similar incidents recorded for Boeing jets?

lysace 10mo ago

So the patch will be physical, I imagine. ("Apply this very expensive special tape from (e.g.) 3M here and here.")

SteveNuts 10mo ago
I believe most A320s can do OTA software updates (including dowgrades)
- lxgr 10mo ago
  OTA? That sounds extremely implausible.
  - sam1714 10mo ago
    It's a thing, but it's not universal on the A320. Original 1984 critical hardware: the box has an EEPROM module, you swap it on the plane. FMS (which requires monthly nav data updates) and all modern hardware: the box can be updated over the ARINC 429 serial bus or Ethernet (newer systems/planes), called dataloading Dataloading had different methods. A320s through the 2000's, most airlines had a 3.5 floppy disk drive on board (Airbus FDDU), and a mechanic fed floppies in. It was slow. Evolution of that was a USB port that took a flash drive. Most current planes of older models just got rid of on-board dataloading. The mechanic uses a laptop with a cable or purpose-built tablet and plugs into a port. The mechanic can download the software via Wi-Fi or cellular onto the device: https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/hardware-systems/portable-dataloaders https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/hardware-systems/p... Airlines can indeed buy a on-board box that connects to Wi-Fi and LTE at the gate which downloads software. This is standard for the latest models that produce more data (A350, 787), but optional for older models. The mechanic still needs to go to the plane and push the buttons to tell it to load. https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/dataloading/eadl-xs https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/dataloading/eadl-x... https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/hardware-systems/groundlink-comm+ https://www.teledynecontrols.com/products/hardware-systems/g...
    - 10mo ago

sxp 10mo ago

The title sounds like speculative clickbait. From https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-11-airbus-update-on-a320-family-precautionary-fleet-action https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-11-ai...: Analysis of a recent event involving an A320 Family aircraft has revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls. This is different from the core claim that the incident was caused by radiation. What are the prior probabilities that the system was exposed to "intense radiation"? Vs some other mundane cause such as a faulty wire or mechanical issues? And what is the evidence supporting the former hypothesis?

kevin_thibedeau 10mo ago
> What are the prior probabilities 100% for electronics operating at altitude. Also on the ground, but we mostly act like it doesn't happen and are usually ignorant of the root cause when it does.
- RealityVoid 10mo ago
  100% of what? Those things have ECC and redundancy to the hilt. The data corruption odds are real and higher than one would expect but still not very high.
  - belter 10mo ago
    Look at pag 138...and correlation with altitude...: https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao2008070.pdf https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
    - RealityVoid 10mo ago
      Yes, look at page 135 as well. They don't know, they have educated guesses. It could be SW, it could be hw. EMI causing bugs is the equivalent of "bad juju".
      - deleted 10mo ago

t0mas88 10mo ago

This is highly unusual, so there may be something more to it than only speculation about radiation. The emergency AD says: > Before next flight after the effective date of this AD, replace or modify each affected ELAC with a serviceable ELAC in accordance with the instructions of the AOT. > > A ferry flight (up to 3 Flight Cycles, non-ETOPS, no passengers) is permitted to position the aeroplane to a location where the replacement or modification can be accomplished. That's a very limiting AD. The "before the next flight" part is unusual, ADs often have a limit to the next inspection or X flight hours or similar, not immediately.

mosura 10mo ago
Is some major new solar activity imminently expected that explains the urgency?
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

thisislife2 10mo ago

I can understand why this would be priority for Airbus even without the incident of a flight losing altitude - recently read that a major philosophical difference between Airbus and Boeing is that Airbus prioritises the safety of the Aircraft through controls (hardware and software) where as Boeing believes a human should always be the final decision maker and be able to over ride any control. An Airbus rarely allows a pilot to over ride any warning or allow the pilot to exceed the specifications of the aircraft, whereas a Boeing will warn the pilot about an unsafe action but will allow the pilot to over ride it. It will be interesting to see how things change when AI tech creeps into Aviation tech.

croes 10mo ago
Didn’t workout with the Boeing 737 Max, did it?
- userbinator 10mo ago
  That was basically the first Boeing that went in the Airbus direction.
  - lxgr 10mo ago
    Crucially, while trying to convince everyone that it’s basically the same old 737 to save on pilot retraining costs, nevermind the significantly larger engines. Airbus is much more transparent about its automation. Pilots even learn about the procedure to fly an A320 with a complete fly-by-wire outage using only mechanical emergency elevator controls and differential thrust.
    - cpgxiii 10mo ago
      > Airbus is much more transparent about its automation. Airbus is OK, but could be better. There is a long history of Airbus crews facing unexpected corner cases in their flight control laws, and fortunately only a few of them have had fatal outcomes. While there are only a few "major" modes, there are a surprisingly large number of edge cases that can be encountered.

sfink 10mo ago

So it's called the Icarus bug, right? Please tell me they're calling it the Icarus bug.

fleroviumna 10mo ago
[dead]