This is the script of my national radio report Monday of this week on
the Airbus mass grounding of planes due to radiation effects on flight
control systems. As always there may have been minor wording
variations from this script as I presented this report live on air.
- - -
Yeah, so this is a fascinating story and one that points out how
technology risks can come in all shapes and sizes. For example, we've
talked about the risks of EMPs -- Electromagnet Pulses -- potentially
damaging large amounts of delicate electronics at the same time with
all kinds of negative consequences.
But it doesn't take an EMP to do real damage. It's been known for
decades that radiation: solar, energized particles, cosmic rays and
more can damage electronics with a particular vulnerability related to
corrupted computer memory. And this has long been a consideration for
any equipment flying in space, so satellites and much other equipment
in orbit or deeper space missions may have both protective shielding
and use various other hardware and software techniques to detect and
correct errors that may occur when for example a bit flips due to a
cosmic ray hit.
Many years ago it was not uncommon for business and even some consumer
computer equipment to have what's now called ECC RAM and and/or other
ECC memory. ECC for Error Correcting Code, but as years went by this
became much less common and now it's mostly found in some high end
systems and of course in space-based equipment where the radiation
concerns are much more severe than here on the ground.
And this usually works by adding additional bits -- aka parity bits,
and depending on the number of these additional bits (which typically
means more cost) you can detect and in some cases correct a certain
number of bit errors.
This appears to be the root cause of this Airbus situation, where they
had to urgently ground thousands of their A320s for what was
reportedly in most cases a relatively quick software update. This was
all triggered by a recent flight where an A320 suddenly dropped a
number of feet actually reportedly injuring a number of passengers.
And Airbus quickly traced this to a solar radiation event that
affected the flight control computers and was not detected and
corrected as it should have been.
This is not really a unique situation, there have been cases where
apparently equipment simply being shipped by plane had memory
corruption seemingly due to radiation hits, and even ground-based
equipment has been known to occasionally apparently be hit this way.
It's interesting to note that when solar radiation storms are
predicted, it's common for some satellite operators to reorient their
satellites to try minimize the risk of radiation induced damage, and
power grid operators may also take protective actions. Also, it's not
uncommon for airlines to reroute polar flights when solar storms are
expected, not only to minimize radiation effects on communications
equipment and other systems (because that polar region can get a
higher radiation dose due to the shape of the Earth's magnetic
field -- but also for the sake of passenger and flight crew health.
It's not just space travelers or moon or Mars colonists that have to
beware of radiation risks in flight or especially when away from the
Earth and its protective magnetic field. Frequent airline flyers and
especially aircraft crews can over time absorb considerable radiation
and the potential health effects seem to not be very well tracked or
understood at this time -- clearly much more research in this area
seems needed.
Ultimately it's important to realize that technology risks to
equipment and related health risks can be where planes fly, where
rockets and satellites travel, and also right here on Terra Firma as
well. All it took to trigger this Airbus incident was an onboard
system that didn't behave as anticipated when it was subjected to a
solar radiation event.
How many other aspects of technology that we increasingly depend on
every day might be similarly vulnerable to a burst of invisible
energetic radiation? Sooner or later, we're likely to find out -- and
probably the hard way.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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