Airbus A320 Solar Radiation Recall
According to aviation insiders, there’s a possible grounding of Airbus narrowbodies coming worldwide.
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10-15 passengers were hospitalized after the aircraft rapidly descended without being instructed by pilots to do so. The uncontrolled descent “likely occurred during an ELAC switch change” according to the National Transportation Safety Board. This is not supposed to happen! If there’s an issue with one ELAC computer, the other is supposed to take control without missing a beat.
BBC (Hacker News):
It’s thought the incident was caused by interference from intense solar radiation, which corrupted data in a computer which controls the aircraft’s elevation.
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Former Qantas captain Dr Ian Getley, who holds a PHD in cosmic and solar radiation in aviation, says flights can be affected by coronal mass ejections (CME), which is when plasma is ejected from the sun into space.
The higher the severity of the CME, the more likely it is that issues could arise with satellites and aircraft electronics above 28,000 ft (8.5 km), he tell us.
Airbus has consequently identified a significant number of A320 Family aircraft currently in-service which may be impacted.
Airbus has worked proactively with the aviation authorities to request immediate precautionary action from operators via an Alert Operators Transmission (AOT) in order to implement the available software and/or hardware protection, and ensure the fleet is safe to fly.
Airbus said on Monday that the vast majority of around 6,000 of its A320-family fleet affected by the safety alert had been modified, with fewer than 100 jets still requiring work.
But some require a longer process and Colombia’s Avianca continued to halt bookings for dates until December 8. JetBlue said it would cancel 20 flights for Monday.
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The sweeping warning exposed the fact that Airbus does not have full real-time awareness of which software version is used given reporting lags, industry sources said.
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The fix involved reverting to an earlier version of software that handles the nose angle. It involves uploading the previous version via a cable from a device called a data loader, which is carried into the cockpit to prevent cyberattacks.
This seems like an impressive response. What’s the software fix for such a hardware problem? I guess you could add redundant storage with checksums to determine which version is correct, but the stated fix of reverting to the previous version of the software doesn’t sound like that.
Previously:
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“JetBlue, _opens new tab_ said it would cancel 20 flights” [emphasis added] I think a stray phrase got in the quotation. 😂😂😂
“What’s the software fix for such a hardware problem?” - except it wasn't a software fix - they reverted to an earlier version. So the question is more - what sort of software change did they make that made it more vulnerable to such issues?
