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.
How did this issue only manifest itself after 37 years in service? Sun radiation isnt a new phenomenon.
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 :)
Not a direct answer to your question, but: the sun (like the earth) has areas that are more “geologically” active; those areas tend to throw out solar flares. As the sun rotates, the area that throws out these solar flares slowly faces toward the earth (solar maximum) then slowly rotates to face away from the earth (solar minimum). The solar cycle is roughly eleven years long.
Currently, we’re just slightly past solar maximum. For the past year or so, the “more active” part of the sun has been roughly facing earth and intermittently spitting out solar flares. When these flares hit the earth’s atmosphere, they cause auroras (which is why we’ve had so many auroras these past couple years) and can interfere with electronic and electrical equipment (see: the Carrington event).
I have no details on what l the exact damage that was caused by the interference the plane suffered, nor any knowledge of how they plan to address the issue. But whatever they come up with is going to take some time to develop - and we’re moving away from solar maximum so being hit with a massive flare is increasingly less likely - at least for another decade. My suspicion is that they’ll come up with a “solution” that actually may not work very well, but it works well enough to give the impression that they’re doing something - and it’ll look like it’s working to some extent, simply because the active side of the sun is rotating away from us.
As the sun rotates, the area that throws out these solar flares slowly faces toward the earth (solar maximum) then slowly rotates to face away from the earth (solar minimum). The solar cycle is roughly eleven years long.
This doesn’t have anything to do with the sun’s rotation. It actually rotates once every 28 days. The solar maximum and solar minimum are just phases in activity caused by internal activity.
As a ham radio operator, I can tell you solar flares can create incredible and somewhat unpredictable changes in radio transmissions. Hams love it because we get to push boundaries from a safe shack, but if I was on a plane that uses radio signals to navigate I would be less happy about solar flares effecting transmissions.
I work in the software industry and I have a guess regarding what the might do to “fix” the problem.
First, we look for the cause, but in this case it is external: we can’t prevent solar flares. So we will turn to mitigation instead:
Data gets flaky and erratic unter radiation, so what we would do is to double- and triple-check the data bits. By adding more levels of data correction, more bits can be wrong and we can still figure what it was supposed to be.
Adding more corrections means more overhead and slower performance, but it can still be made to work within the given constraints of real-time processing. They will need to find a balance between hardening and usefulness.
Is it a software fix? Or are they adding shielding around the flight control system or something?
The articles I saw mentioned that it would be fixed in software.
Sounds like SEE (single event effect) if it’s something fixable by software.
TID (total ionizing dose) is another flavor of radiation effect on components, but that’s a total lifetime effect where it slowly degrades. Using rad hard parts or adding extra shielding is the main fix.
SEEs are transient effects from high energy charged particles that can cause bit flips and latch ups in circuitry depending on where the particle hits and deposits it’s charge in the circuitry. Extra shielding can help prevent these as well, but they can also be mitigated in software, sometimes the fix is just error detection, or power cycling a specific section of circuitry to clear a latchup
Appreciate the write-up, thanks!
I found this diagram, and this should mean that the levels will drop by around 2030?
Why is half of your graph Japanese?
I think the website is old, and the blurry bits were a prediction
The new cycle is expected to start late in 2019 or in 2020, with solar maximum to be reached between 2023 and 2026 and the maximum (smoothed) sunspot number in the 95 to 130 range.
A different color and a legend would have been nicer imo
Here’s a better one. We just passed the predicted maximum point
