41–50 of 184 posts
Do they really need to ground the entire fleet for that? One incident for ten thousand planes in the air for years. I'd think that giving airlines two months to fix it would be sufficient.
Do they really need to ground the entire fleet for that? One incident for ten thousand planes in the air for years. I'd think that giving airlines two months to fix it would be sufficient.
"We take proactive measures, whereas our competitor only takes action after multiple fatal crashes!"
I’d really, really like to know what microcontroller family this was found on. Assuming that this is a safety processor (lockstep, ECC, etc) it suggests that ECC was insufficient for the level of bit flips they’re seeing — and if the concern is data corruption, not unintended restart, it means it’s enough flips in one word to be undetectable. The environment they’re operating in isn’t that different from everyone els…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-event_upset
For manned spaceflight, NASA ups N from 3 to 5.
Other mitigations include completely disabling all CPU caches (with a big performance hit), and continuously refreshing the ECC RAM in background.
There are also a bunch of hardware mitigations to prevent "latch up" of the digital circuits.
Do they really need to ground the entire fleet for that? One incident for ten thousand planes in the air for years. I'd think that giving airlines two months to fix it would be sufficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gracefully handling hardware faults is a software problem. The Air France Flight 447 crash was the result of bad software and bad hardware.
I'm reminded of the Apollo moon landing where the computer was rapidly rebooting and being in an OK-ish state to continue to be useful almost immediately
I’d really, really like to know what microcontroller family this was found on. Assuming that this is a safety processor (lockstep, ECC, etc) it suggests that ECC was insufficient for the level of bit flips they’re seeing — and if the concern is data corruption, not unintended restart, it means it’s enough flips in one word to be undetectable. The environment they’re operating in isn’t that different from everyone els…
You can see much more data in the report:
https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
I've noticed that some carriers seem to be suggesting that there might be no impact to flights, but isn't this an immediate grounding for each aircraft until the update is made? How is it possible that this wouldn't impact upon flight schedules?
The grounding is for 6000 of 11000 A320 series. I believe it's some combination of software and hardware configuration that is at risk.
Airbus/Thales's fix in this case appears to add more error checking, and to restart the misbehaving component. https://bea.aero/fileadmin/user_upload/BEA2024-0404-BEA2025-...
("une supervision interne du composant à l’origine de la défaillance ; - un mécanisme de redémarrage automatique de ce composant dès lors que la défaillance est détectée)
Do they really need to ground the entire fleet for that? One incident for ten thousand planes in the air for years. I'd think that giving airlines two months to fix it would be sufficient.
So the immediate cost to Airbus of grounding the fleet is quite low, whilst the downside of not grounding the fleet (risk of incident, lawsuits, reputation, etc.) could be substantial.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am worried about a software fix for what looks like hardware problem.
Gracefully handling hardware faults is a software problem. The Air France Flight 447 crash was the result of bad software and bad hardware.