this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
77 points (98.7% liked)

Tech

2450 readers
3 users here now

A community for high quality news and discussion around technological advancements and changes

Things that fit:

Things that don't fit

Community Wiki

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Vacant@programming.dev
77
Flights disrupted after Airbus discovers intense sun radiation could impact flight control data (www.bbc.com)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/tech@programming.dev
13 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The maths and physics are the same, the impact is not. It's about energy and how well you can shield against it. Shielding against visible light is simple, thin cardboard is probably enough, the aluminium frame of an aircraft is more than sufficient and the plastic or ceramic packaging of a microcontroller too. Shielding against gamma radiation is hard, you'll need something like a thick layer of lead, and even then every once in a while a photon might get through.

Edit: The incident that caused this grounding was a solar flare, so not just some visible light.