Flight disruption warning as Airbus requests modifications to 6k planes (bbc.com)

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46082296

At least they didn’t wait for a crash before doing this :/

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.

Is this the graph of the root cause?

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression

Something seems off when the same nonsensical report gets through the world's journalists (ok...arts graduates, but none of them is married to an engineer??), is published everywhere, then many hours elapse and still nobody has been able to make sense of it.

Meanwhile Boeing would probably ignore any issue as any incident was already included in the annual budget.

> interference from intense solar radiation, which corrupted data in a computer which controls the aircraft's elevation

Has anybody kept count of "fly by wire" failures in aircraft?

It fills me with dread that a computer programme is between the pilot's controls and the control surfaces.

I am amazed that it works at all.

Thank god we still have responsible businesses

Didn’t spacex fix this problem by just adding a ridiculous redundancy of components? i.e the solution might be to install more HW to parallelise ?