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.
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