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The 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
by loeg 11mo ago
The 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.
- piker 11mo agoInteresting how radiation issues could be solved in software.
- lazide 11mo agoFinally turning on the ECC RAM option?
- mandeepj 11mo agoMaybe there's a range that requires a change? Now imagine, if it was over the air update, then maybe there would be no disruption?
- matja 11mo agoPerhaps it's improving the checksum algorithm on network packets, or even ... adding one.
- amelius 11mo agoMakes you wonder, if/how _passengers_ are directly protected against the radiation
- fragmede 11mo agoThey're not. Excessive high altitude flight increases your chance of developing melanoma. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9447865/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9447865/
- amelius 11mo agoOk, I'll take an aisle seat more often now instead of a window seat.
- userbinator 11mo agoUnless you fly as often as pilots and other onboard staff, it's unlikely to be significant.
- londons_explore 11mo agoIf flying were invented today, I bet it wouldn't be allowed due to the radiation. It's more than many medical procedures which guidelines say to only do when the medical benefits outweigh the radiation risk.
- burnt-resistor 11mo agoPassengers flying now and then, it's not a big deal, but aircrews are at increased risk of cancer.
- AnimalMuppet 11mo agos/solved/mitigated/
- stackghost 11mo agoIt comes down to voting algorithms and memory persistence. Sometimes there is a threshold before data are "voted out". I don't work on the A320 but solar radiation is a well-known issue in avionics, generally speaking. Edit: deleted some speculation
- SoftTalker 11mo agoAgreed, I expected additional shielding or something physical like that.
- tonyarkles 11mo agoTo give you a bit of insight, around the same timeframe (late October/early November) I directly observed two high-accuracy RTK GPS receivers reporting high accuracy (2cm), full 3D DGPS lock with carrier phase, and positions wandering within about a 5m circle horizontally. The altitude was staying pretty consistent (within about 1m, which was outside of the reported accuracy but not bad) until there was a sudden 60m altitude shift. This was all while they were sitting static on the ground, verified both by the crew and the accelerometer, gyro, and RADAR data. There wasn’t a software fix per se, but we were able to quickly add a check to verify that the Kalman Filter’s position variance estimate was on the same order of magnitude as the accuracy level that the receivers were reporting and put a big red warning up. This wasn’t a flight-critical system, but it is the first time we’d ever seen that behaviour from those receivers and we’ve used them for 5 years.
- RossBencina 11mo agoNot my area at all, but I'm extremely surprised that a fly-by-wire system would use GPS as an altitude reference. Is that really the case?
- adhambadr 11mo agoIt’s a combined signal system, using pressure based sensors + gps.
- ape4 11mo agoAnd inertial guidance too?
- adhambadr 11mo agoI don’t know what airbus uses I only looked into the schematics of commercial avionics like Garmin. I doubted though IMU drift and calibration introduce more error than they can provide in useful signal, old school pressure sensors + gps adjusted manually or automatically for regional pressure settings (pilots get these numbers through radio when they enter a new pressure area) is accurate enough (~1m). I’ll let a real avionics engineer correct me here, I’d be curious if that signal is worth the hassle + I can imagine such tiny SMD sensors ARE the biggest victims of radiation hallucination.
- nutjob2 11mo agoAbout one third require hardware mods.
- CGMthrowaway 11mo agoOn 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
- kranke155 11mo agoWhat do you think it could be ?
- captainkrtek 11mo agoDo you think they're using the guise of "its solar radiation" as cover to do a software update to fix a more problematic "bug", and perhaps tangentially there are some changes in said-update to improve some error correcting type code (eg: related to detecting spurious bit flips).
- fooker 11mo agoYeah I don't buy it either. If it was really 'solar radiation' there would be more small details.
- convenwis 11mo agoI'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.
- BoredPositron 11mo agoBecause the ones that only required a software update on their fleet like bluejet have already done it. Like it's stated in the article.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoThe software update is actually a rollback, apparently. https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/669424-airbus-a320-recall-due-flight-control-issue.html https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/669424-airbus-a320-recal...
- nutjob2 11mo ago"The ELAC software update (actually a rollback) is the fix for around 4,500 affected aircraft. A further 2,000 or so will require hardware mods."
- pixelesque 11mo agoNote 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.
- rester324 11mo agoAlso: > The radiation corrupted data in the ELAC - a computer used to operate control surfaces on the wings and horizontal stabilizer.
- Zetaphor 11mo agoIt's unclear to me how a software update is supposed to help this component with radiation shielding
- doctorwho42 11mo agoRedundancy. Unless they had total component failure, its most likely localized and if you create redundancy like RAID - you may be able to counter whatever they are seeing as a failure mode. Or at least reduce the likelihood of impact on the flight giving them time to replace components on the ground
- a-dub 11mo agoi 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.
- ArtRichards 11mo agoand > But EasyJet says it has already completed the required software update and is planning on operating its flights as normal on Saturday
- Animats 11mo agoI'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_in_Building_Fault_-Tolerant_Flight_Control_System_for_a_Civil_Aircraft https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26587285_Challenges...