Good morning, fellow travelers. Glad you’re here, and hope you’re doing well. This is Saturday, Nov. 29, 2005. It’s day two in your calendar entitled “365 ideas for a Used Turkey.”
Today in History:
1972: Atari Releases Pong. It immediately had people bouncing off walls.
1929: First flight over the South Pole.
1777: City of San Jose Founded. Do you know the way?
Birthdays today include: C.S. Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, and Bluesman John Mayall.
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Interesting news from the world of aviation this morning, Turns out the folks at Airbus have discovered a problem with the “Fly By Wire” systems in their planes, which have required a recall of about half of their fleet, some 6000 planes. The BBC is saying:
…..The move comes after the discovery that intense radiation from the Sun could corrupt data crucial to flight controls. About 6,000 planes are thought to be affected, which makes up about half of Airbus’s global fleet, but it is understood most will be able to undergo a simple software update.
This one may take a bit of explaining. Some of you may already be aware of what I’ll tell you here, so I’ll keep it brief.
Now, these sunspots tend to run in eleven-year cycles. We are now just past the peak of the current cycle, which accounts for the number of nights we’ve been able to see the “Northern Lights.” What are Northern Lights?
These magnetic fields, when they strike earth, have a habit of causing problems with anything involving radio waves, or, for that matter, almost any electronic tech, which are after all, themselves magnetic fields. They also cause problems with all kinds of digital equipment. Computers, telephones, and yes, navigation equipment in planes, for example.
As a Ham Radio operator myself, such things can be a good or bad thing, because they bend radio waves at certain frequencies. Most radio waves go up and out. Sunspots and the way they interact with our earth can bend radio waves back down to earth, often thousands of miles further away from the transmitter than they were intended.
GPS systems are affected, too. I can recall being on Second Avenue in Brooklyn at a delivery near the Navy Yard one afternoon, when my GPS woke up and told me it had lost all of the GPS satellites. When it finally came to about three minutes later, it swore I was near Harrisonburg, Virginia. Once the storm passed, I found myself in Brooklyn again.
So now, you can easily understand why the concern about the problems as regards these planes. An example of sunspots causing issues with planes would include Qantas Flight 72:
Qantas Flight 72 (QF72) was a scheduled flight from Singapore Changi Airport to Perth Airport by an Airbus A330. On 7 October 2008, the flight made an emergency landing at Learmonth Airport near the town of Exmouth, Western Australia, following an in-flight upset that included a pair of sudden, uncommanded pitch-down manoeuvres that caused severe injuries—including fractures, lacerations and spinal injuries—to several of the passengers and crew.[
According to some of the chatter I’m seeing on the Ham Radio forums, the cause of the Qantas incident was suggested to be:
“A single-event error (SEE)”, is a change of state caused by one single ionizing particle (e.g. ions, electrons, photons) striking a sensitive node in a live micro-electronic device, such as in a microprocessor, semiconductor memory, or power transistors. The state change is a result of the free charge created by ionization in or close to an important node of a logic element (e.g. memory “bit”). The error in device output or operation caused as a result of the strike is called an SEU or a soft error.
In other words it got its bit flipped (0 or 1)
OK, a couple points: We’ve known about these problems with electromagnetic pulses interfering with such systems since at least the Qantas incident some 17 years ago. Why the bleep are we just now addressing this issue?
Secondly, I’m wondering how a software fix is going to solve this issue, and given the depth of the failure I saw in Brooklyn, for example, why a hardware fix isn’t indicated instead. Namely, fortification of the RF shielding. Apparently, the fix involves adding error checking, which I am amazed wasn’t already in the system to the proposed degree. Thing is, even error checking can only be effective to a certain point. At some point, physical shielding is the only answer, and even that isn’t going to totally solve the problem.
Qantas, of course, isn’t the only airline affected. American Airlines, for example, who hasn’t made any noise at all of late on the subject, has the largest fleet in the world of Airbus 320’s. It’s down to waiting for the other shoe to drop on that one.
As we become more and more dependent on digital technology, we also will become more sustainable to such issues.
Now… about self-driving cars and (shudder) trucks.…
