Posted on 11/28/2025 1:03:54 PM PST by DFG
Airbus, one of the biggest aircraft makers globally, has issued a major warning that the company said could likely ground many passenger jets worldwide.
The aeronautics company announced Friday that they have discovered a potential vulnerability in the software on board the Airbus A320 during solar storms, which may hinder pilots from steering or stabilizing the plane while in the air.
Airbus issued an Alert Operators Transmission (AOT), a global warning that urges all airlines using the A320 passenger jet to immediately update their software and hardware to better protect against radiation interference.
Industry safety experts believe the problem originated on a JetBlue flight from Cancun, Mexico to Newark, New Jersey that suddenly suffered an uncontrolled drop in altitude of thousands of feet on October 30.
At least 15 passengers were injured and the plane was forced to make an emergency landing in Florida.
An investigation involving the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) found intense solar radiation corrupted critical data in the flight control computers, causing the plane to momentarily lose accurate positioning information and plunge downwards.
Intense solar radiation in Earth's atmosphere is often caused by solar flares or coronal mass ejections, which bombard the planet with powerful bursts of charged particles and electromagnetic energy.
These space weather events can sometimes interfere with satellites, GPS, radio signals, and, in this case, even the electronics inside modern aircraft flying at high altitudes.
Daily Mail has reached out to both Airbus and JetBlue for comment regarding the incident and how many flights may be grounded by the emergency warning.
The A320 recently became the best-selling commercial aircraft in history, surpassing the Boeing 737. Industry experts fear the problem could impact 6,000 jets, according to Reuters.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Ah, the old “Update Your Firmware” order!
I can understand how additional radiation shielding would be needed, but a firmware or software update?
And how could modern avionics be designed and built without adequate shielding in the first place?
Couldn’t be bad software coding… no no… has to be sunspots…
A firmware update would do nothing.
A software ‘glitch’. And they say AI will rule the world.
Did the Boeing (MCAS software) people that should have been fired - actually jailed - just transfer? 🙄
They can add error correction to the code to help prevent issues.
Sleeper Chips
“A firmware update would do nothing.”
You know that?
Headline says 6,000 passenger jets. That’s quite a large aircraft.
so Airbus also has a DEI problem ?
Seriously, the avionics and pilot interfaces in Boeing and Airbus are drastically different. Boeing relies on the pilot to make active decisions and push buttons, Airbus designs their systems so the airplane makes the decision and the pilot passively monitors.
“so Airbus also has a DEI problem ?”
Likely so if they didn’t comply with radiation requirements.
Cue the guy from “Airplane” pulling the plug.
“…found intense solar radiation corrupted critical data in the flight control computers,“
Switch the computers off.
Ahhh - my favorite troll...
Yes - I do. And being the software guru you claim to be you should know that “sunspot corruption” is one of the most commonly used excuses to cover up for bad software coding.
The best a firmware update could do to prevent “sunspot corruption” is add additional checksums to memory values and not let the software react to bad data. At best that’s a pretty flimsy band-aid around a very bad problem. If it indeed WAS “sunspot corruption” that means the memory, cpu, the software itself can get bombarded and corrupt everything - including frying the CPU, causing the software to go heywire, etc;
The only real solution to “sunspot corruption” is to shield the components and that includes every electronic device on the plane
Occam’s Razor - With the firmware fix being such a quick turnaround it means they found a bug that caused the drop and released it and blamed “sunspot corruption” to save face.
If it is, indeed, “sunspot corruption” every jet from every vendor is now a potential deathtrap.
"Fly by wire" is nifty; until it isn't!
As I told TexasGator, that’s a very flimsy band-aid. You can’t error correct your way around external corruption. What if the memory that contains the program for the checksum is corrupted? What if the CPU gets bombarded and stops operating?
If it is, indeed, “sunspot corruption”, every plane that’s fly-by-wire needs to be grounded immediately as it’s a potential death trap.
“Yes - I do. And being the software guru you claim to be you should know that “sunspot corruption” is one of the most commonly used excuses to cover up for bad software coding.”
How do you know that the firmware coding is not faulty?
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