this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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Flights disrupted after Airbus discovers intense sun radiation could impact flight control data (www.bbc.com)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] scratchee@feddit.uk 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I think I read that the issue is relatively new thanks to a software update (speculation in another thread, so questionable veracity). So perhaps a change that wasn’t flawed by itself but by bad luck combined with this radiation sensitivity to make the issue significant.

But also solar flares are kind of rare, especially on the stronger end, so easy to imagine bug reliant on them sitting idle for years.

[–] DoPeopleLookHere@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago

Solar flares come and go in ~11 year cycles. So strong solar flares are common now (we've had a few this past year) but go dormant for a while at a time.