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Do you think they're using the guise of "its solar radiation" as cover to do a software update to fix a more problematic "bug", and perhaps tangentially there a
by captainkrtek 10mo ago
Do you think they're using the guise of "its solar radiation" as cover to do a software update to fix a more problematic "bug", and perhaps tangentially there are some changes in said-update to improve some error correcting type code (eg: related to detecting spurious bit flips).
- fooker 10mo agoYeah I don't buy it either. If it was really 'solar radiation' there would be more small details.
- chasing0entropy 10mo agoI would say its pretty detailed -an unknown interference caused a single crc protected 32 bit word to be corrupted simultaneously, by timestamp, in both the flight controller hardware and the black box data recorder. My concern would be what error correction mechanism did or did not catch the corruption in memory and why did it not recover without critical impact to operations?
- fooker 10mo ago> corrupted simultaneously This sounds like a software bug. Something like - {copy a to b, checksum a--b} Instead of - {copy a to t, checksum a--t, copy t to b, checksum a--b} I bet the fix is along these lines, with the caveat of real time systems/etc.
- dboreham 10mo agoReading the Airbus press release, I wonder if this is what happened: Solar radiation event led to alpha particle induced data corruption in a flight control computer memory (could be DRAM, SRAM, on-chip cache, registers...). These failures are supposed to be transient (reboot and all is well). This is an anticipated failure mode. Only one (of three?) computers should be affected by such a failure and therefore the remaining two keep on running the plane. But what happened is <something> went wrong with the failover/voting mechanism (as often happens with one-off seldom-executed failover code). The result was no flight control computer functionality until the entire system was rebooted. Hence the emergency landing. The fix is to address that software error, with perhaps a secondary fix TBD to harden the hardware (add some shielding perhaps). The fact that they talk about data corruption and not just a malfunction suggests alpha bit flip rather than latch-up. Then send the whole statement through a French to English translator to make it a bit more confusing.
- londons_explore 10mo agoMy guess is they haven't managed to point to the single memory bit which was flipped to cause this result. The software update is probably more along the lines of 'lets just introduce a watchdog task which resets the system if the output deviates too far from the input for too long'.
- aunty_helen 10mo agoNo, that would be straight to jail.
- vlovich123 10mo agoRemind me who from Boeing went to jail?
- stackghost 10mo agoAirbus is in Europe where the Rule of Law still exists
- vlovich123 10mo agoThat’s what we naively thought here too.
- kakacik 10mo agoLook at how US government treats financial behemoths which actively harm whole mankind vs how EU treats them. There is way more to this topic obviously (who wants to harm their local company), but generally US is pro-companies while Europe is pro-people.
- vlovich123 10mo agoDeutsche Bank and HSBC, two major European banks, have repeatedly admitted they have engaged in money laundering activities for Russia, drug cartels and terrorists and have consistently failed to meet their AML obligations. The US is the only entity that’s going after these banks for these issues winning significant judgments and even with that backdrop you don’t see any EU enforcement.
- maximilianburke 10mo agoNot in aviation.
- Bratmon 10mo agoDoes the 737-Max not count as aviation anymore?
- edoceo 10mo agoIt does. It is but the Max issue was well different to this one.
- superxpro12 10mo agoCounterpoint: Boeing MCAS tho
- schmuckonwheels 10mo agoNo, because aerospace is not garden-variety Silicon Valley webshittery. There is a slightly different level of discipline and engineering ethics at play.