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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 2 points 9 months ago (11 children)

...for approximately 4-5 seconds before the autopilot corrected the trajectory.

Not trying to blame them, but where were pilots in this?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 11 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    It's fly by wire, the pilot doesn't have direct control of the plane, which is the main issue here.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    Shouldnt there be alarms when the auto pilot detected an unexpected rapid elevation change?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    It's not elevation, the height of a plane is called altitude. The change was in the elevator which is a control surface on the plane. There is so many people with so little understanding weighing in on this thread it's hilarious

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (2 children)

    altitude: 1 a: the vertical elevation of an object above a surface (such as sea level or land) of a planet or natural satellite

    elevation: 1: the height to which something is elevated: such as c: the height above the level of the sea

    Looks like the same word in a slightly different package. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] [S] 0 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    I wonder if it was even possible for the pilots to intervene, or if the system was interpreting any signal from them as "pitch down" during that time

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    The pilot should be able to intervene. If the system interprets pilot input as nonsensical it overrides the pilot, but the pilot can switch to what Airbus calls "direct law" which directly maps pilot input to control surfaces without any sanity checks from the flight control system.

  • source
  • parent