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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by otter@lemmy.ca to c/tech@programming.dev
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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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[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Not sure about a specific article for planes, but some forms of solar radiation can cause random bits to flip to the opposite when it crosses through computer hardware like memory.

These randomly occur already just by us existing in the solar system, and error correction algorithms, hardware like ECC memory, and shielding helps to prevent and correct these issues when they do happen. The intense radiation recently, the same that caused the extended auroras, caused more and stronger occurrences though.

One flight we know was affected despite systems that help prevent issues like that, so they're having the software reloaded on every plane that might have been affected.

[–] 872XXE@feddit.org 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Basically I can confirm this.

Depending on the used hardware, the hard- and software is able to detect and correct these so called “softerrors” or bit flips in the volatile memory (RAM) of a computing system. In our products we have the exact same problem and it depends on the complexity (and at the end on the price $$$) how affected the product is by this physical effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset?wprov=sfti1

[–] criticon@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago

In my previous work we had a bunch of devices that failed at the final installation. All of them passed that test at the end of line at the plant without any issues but they simply refused to boot at the customer site. When we read the ROM contents some data was corrupted We had a very extensive investigation and finally they realized that all the ones that failed had been flown instead of using ground shipping and there had been some solar activity so the final conclusion was bit shift due to solar storm and since fixing was to difficult and expensive it was just decided to stop shipping this particular device by air (it used a very cheap flash memory)

[–] zaphod@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Here's an article with a few more details https://avherald.com/h?article=52f1ffc3

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 month ago

Nice thank you, this one has the details I was curious about

In a service difficulty report submitted to the FAA the operator stated, that the Elevator Aileron Computer #2 (ELAC2) was identified faulty causing an uncommanded pitch down in cruise flight, the autopilot remained engaged

On Nov 7th 2025 the NTSB reported: "During cruise, the aircraft experienced an uncontrolled descent for approximately 4-5 seconds before the autopilot corrected the trajectory. This likely occurred during an ELAC switch change." The occurrence caused 10 injuries on board, the NTSB opened an investigation.

The subsequent investigation identified a vulnerability with the ELAC B hardware fitted with software L104 in case of exposure to solar flares.

This identified vulnerability could lead in the worst case scenario to an uncommanded elevator movement that may result in exceeding the aircraft structural capability.