I highly recommend finding a cloud chamber (various science museums have them) to visualize just how much radiation is flying around.
Part of my work touches high power switches. I am going to do a bad job relating this story, but one of the power engineers was talking about how electric train switches in EU (Switzerland?) were having triggering issues. These were big MW scale IGBTs, not something you want to false trigger. Anyway, they eventually traced the problem to cosmic rays, and just turned the entire package vertical so the die was end-on to space (the mountains around were shielding the horizontal direction), and the problem went away.
> just turned the entire package vertical so the die was end-on to space (the mountains around were shielding the horizontal direction), and the problem went away.
That's a pretty cool solution! For some reason I was expecting something a lot more elaborated
It's important to note that this is just Airbus's best guess as to the cause, as there's no smoking gun: they simply exhausted their troubleshooting and were left scratching their heads so this was the "least unlikely" cause they could come up with given the circumstances.
I thought the same, but in a deeper dive into the postmortem, I think it's not a cop out from their side. The report is actually really well done ( I personally was impressed). The reasons it probably was a bit flip is that the CPU did not have edac on it in this instance so bit flips are expected. The consensus mechanism failed in this case and that is what they are updating, because even though the module gave wrong data because of presumably bit flips, the consensus should have prevented the dive.
Not going to happen. The potentially huge cost to their reputation alone makes it not worth it, the modification would cost money and make logistics more difficult, and the plane couldn't be used (or sold) worldwide anymore.
Isn't a major feature of consensus algorithms for them to be tolerant to failures? Even basic algorithms take error handling into account and shouldn't be taken out by a bit flip in any one component.
My reaction was initially that it was a cop out, but looking a bit in the report and thinking things through, I think that, yes, it's most likely a bit flip.
“ The increasing reliance of computers in fly-by-wire systems in aircraft, which use electronics rather than mechanical systems to control the plane in the air, also mean the risk posed by bit flips when they do occur is higher.”
Bit of an understatement. I don’t think there any active passenger airliners in the first world today that aren’t fly-by-wire. The MD-80 was the last of its kind and it’s been out of passenger operation for what, 10 years now?
Any Boeing other than 777/787 does not use fly-by-wire.
However, that doesn't illuminate the possibility of these errors. Whilst the flight-controls are mechanically linked, the autopilot/trim is electric, so is still suspectable to bit-flips.
Still a lot of software involved in controlling the aircraft. The 737 Max incidents were eventually tracked to software quality issues, IIRC. All those old designs are being upgraded with modern avionics, so even if the airframe and linkages are old-school, the inputs are being driven by digital computers. At least that’s my understanding. I confess to not being a “plane guy,” though I have spent a lot of time traveling in planes, and I have stayed at a few Holiday Inn Express hotels.
From what I've read, the plane was not unstable, it just handles different, but stable; pilots just need to do the aircraft-specific retraining to as they usually do whenever you encounter different aircrafts with different handling characteristics.
Boeing wanted to pretend there is difference at all, to skip on retraining.
Boeing 717 is still in service and it's essentially an MD-80. Many 737s are in service and flight controls are hydraulic-boosted cable-and-pulley operated; the type design dates to the 1960s.
Not to mention, the system affected by the bit flips were designed in the 90's AND newer designed systems have EDAC so they are not susceptible to the same kind of issue. Honestly, if you look into the thing, the press coverage of the event is atrocious.
I feel like using "Cosmic Rays" as a reason is equivalent to "Aliens". It makes for good clickbait so everyone is fast to point at it as the reason even if there is no reason to actually believe that the bitflip was due to cosmic rays.
> even if there is no reason to actually believe that the bitflip was due to cosmic rays.
What if there is reason to consider it as it is actually a known, proven, observable phenomenon, especially one with greater likelihood/intensity as you climb in altitude, like planes do, and that likelihood/intensity also scales with solar cycle intensity, which we are currently experiencing the peak of?
Or perhaps you think the Aurora Borealis are because of Aliens too?
It did not. The article itself acknowledged that there is certainly reason to consider it a possibility, predicated on the fact that the people that make the thing stated as such and that experts in the field agree it's also a risk in general, but wasn't particularly high that day.
Average activity is not no activity. Average risk is not No risk.
And even if it wasn't the issue in that instance, it's not hard to reason why it's worth hardening against such a possibility in the absence of any other explanation given just days later "sensors mounted on UK weather balloons at 40,000ft (12km) measured one of the largest radiation events to hit Earth in roughly two decades."
Airbus didn't ground these plains because there was "No reason to believe" a known proven and observed phenomenon might have been the culprit and/or that it is on the level with something we as yet have no proof of to be generous in characterizing your comparing it to aliens.
When you do Raman spectroscopy in a lab the software literally has an automatic cosmic ray rejection mode because for autonomy you are very likely to get cosmic ray initiated return signals over the course of a couple of hours.
"If the signal looks amazingly strong but unexpected and sharp, it's probably a cosmic ray" was what I was trained for.
Thank you for bringing reason to this topic where everyone is losing their mind when it comes up. Cosmic rays are sexy, They're sciency, but they're not a good explanation when you actually run the math.
Random but flips are pretty much always bad hardware. That's what the literature says when you actually study it. And that's also what we find at work: we wrote a program that occupied most of the free ram and checked it for bit flips. Deployed on a sizeable fleet of machines. We found exactly that: yes there were bit flips, but they were highly concentrated on specific machines and disappeared after changing hardware.
In practice such an event is rare, and I would expect there to be enough shielding to avoid it from interfering with the electronics. The fact that there is no hard evidence is why it's hard to argue against this clickbait claim, since technically they could be right.
The cosmic radiation that reaches Earth's surface consists mainly of particles that cannot be stopped by thin shields (e.g. muons or other particles with very high energies), otherwise they would not have passed through the atmosphere.
So shielding is not a solution that can be applied in a vehicle. You need something like an underground bunker to be sure that no cosmic radiation can penetrate it.
The only reason that makes rare the events caused by cosmic radiation is that if those particles can pass through shields that means that in most cases they will also pass through the electronic devices without being absorbed and causing malfunction.
That reminds me of how the manufacturer's customer service department for my car some thirty years ago tried to convince me that the problems with the ignition electronics could also be caused by solar flares.
Which could have been the case, of course, but then it would surely have affected other vehicle owners as well.
Though, maybe the sun did shine just for me back then, you can never be sure, can't you.
I briefly considered consulting an astronomer.
There was a funny story about how sun shining on a UV sensitive electronic component was the root cause of a mysterious failure that was time and day dependent.
I thought planes had insane redundancy exactly so stuff like that don´t happen. How can a bit flip cause the system that controls altitude to malfunction like that?
From what I've heard (FWIW), Airbus released a version of the software for one of the flight computers that removed SEU protections (hence grounding affected models until they could be downgraded to the previous version).
There was still hardware redundancy though. Operation of the plane's elevator switched to a secondary computer. Presumably it was also running the same vulnerable software, but they diverted and landed early in part to minimize this risk.
Why would you ever expect one bit flip? You have a flip rate and you design your system to tolerate a certain bit flip rate. Assumptions made during requirements establishment were wrong and nature eventually let them know they had negative margin.
What if in the time between initialization of cosmic_ray to False, and the time this if statement executes, a legitimate cosmic ray flips the bool bit representing cosmic_ray?
This is a really good point and a common error in bit flip detection code. To avoid this kind of look-before-you-leap hazard the following is recommended:
0. Always use a) SECDED hardware ECC and b) checksums on network links and I/O everywhere.
1. When unable to 1.a), add (72,64) 8-bits Hamming code per 64-bits (or) N>2 redundancy copies on physically-separate silicon for critical data and code. This is a significant performance hit, but safety is more important in some uses. (Don't neglect the integrity and reliability of code storage, loading, and execution paths either.)
2. Consider using Space Shuttle high-availability, high-reliability "voting" of N identically-designed behavior, possibly different manufacturer system control elements.
This is silly. Rapidly refreshing the data that was (presumably) flipped by a cosmic ray last time won't do anything to prevent an error in whatever it hits next time. Unless the theory is that cosmic rays are somehow more likely to hit these particular bits compared to all the millions (billions?) of others in the system...in which case I have a different objection.
What is silly is media coverage of this. The error was in the ADIRU. They are updating the ELAC. The ELAC takes the decision based on multiple data streams from 3 ADIRU units and the issue being fixed is that it took the wrong decision. The ADIRU will probably continue having SEU but it will be fine.
Not all circuits are equally sensitive. The parts that are known to be sensitive or critical are protected by redundancies and error checking, which are probabilistic protection. You haven't completely eliminated the possibility of corruption, just made it incredibly unlikely. Refreshing your inputs is another form of probabilistic protection focused on mitigating the consequences.
we had a "historic bad solarweather" a bunch of years ago and i talked with a cyber cafe operator that "you could have more computers bluescreen on this week than usual".
to me it got really weird when he said later he really did, but honestly its 50/50 that could had been just incidental.
in another note there are some "rather intense" discussions when someone speedrunning a game gets a "unreproducible glitch" in their favor, some claim its a flaw from ageing dram hardware, but some always point that it could be a cosmic ray bitfliping the right bit. (https://tildes.net/~games/1eqq/the_biggest_myth_in_speedrunn...)
I thought some combination of error correction and redundant systems was already widespread in airplanes to prevent cosmic-ray induced errors. (GPT agrees.) What am I missing? I've read multiple articles on this, and none of them address the fact that the problem, at the level of detail described in the article, should have been prevented by technology available and widely deployed for decades.
You're missing that the systems were designed in the 90's and they had no edac on them but instead relied on redundancy and a consensus system. The fact bit flips happened is not why they grounded the things and updated sw, they grounded them to address the consensus algorithm in the other CPU that did not get the bit flips.
Do you have a source on that? The current article describes the software very differently:
> In any case, the software updates rolled out by the company appear to be quick and easy to install. Many airlines completed them within hours. The software works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight.
What do you think this adds? These things are sycophant confident idiots; they will agree and agree they're incorrect at the slightest challenge in the same interaction.
I'm quite aware of the limitations. That's why I bothered to post a comment. But it's definitely better to do due diligence by asking first, since many responses can then be checked. Mentioning it in the comment shows the effort, similar to "Google turned up nothing".
Part of my work touches high power switches. I am going to do a bad job relating this story, but one of the power engineers was talking about how electric train switches in EU (Switzerland?) were having triggering issues. These were big MW scale IGBTs, not something you want to false trigger. Anyway, they eventually traced the problem to cosmic rays, and just turned the entire package vertical so the die was end-on to space (the mountains around were shielding the horizontal direction), and the problem went away.
That's a pretty cool solution! For some reason I was expecting something a lot more elaborated
Most modern servers at least implement ECC on their RAM. I would expect flight electronics to be designed to a higher standard.
Not going to happen. The potentially huge cost to their reputation alone makes it not worth it, the modification would cost money and make logistics more difficult, and the plane couldn't be used (or sold) worldwide anymore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/business/boeing-737-max-w...
https://www.boeing.com/737-max-updates/mcas/
Two different companies.
Boeing had tons of failures recently, flight search services started adding filters for the airplane because people didn’t want to fly with them.
Airbus is doing better for now, hopefully it will stay that way.
https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
My reaction was initially that it was a cop out, but looking a bit in the report and thinking things through, I think that, yes, it's most likely a bit flip.
Bit of an understatement. I don’t think there any active passenger airliners in the first world today that aren’t fly-by-wire. The MD-80 was the last of its kind and it’s been out of passenger operation for what, 10 years now?
However, that doesn't illuminate the possibility of these errors. Whilst the flight-controls are mechanically linked, the autopilot/trim is electric, so is still suspectable to bit-flips.
The plane is fundamentally unstable because of the huge engines (which they have to improve fuel efficiency).
The only way to correct that is software with an angle of attack sensor.
They only installed one sensor though.
Does that sound like a software error or a fundamental physical design flaw?
Boeing wanted to pretend there is difference at all, to skip on retraining.
I'll leave the googling to you, but this isn't true. The plane isn't fundamentally unstable, and certainly not like a modern fly-by-wire fighter.
It might help to read what aerodynamic instability actually means before making such a claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_derivatives
That's why there's an angle of attack sensor, to keep the plane outside of that failure range.
What if there is reason to consider it as it is actually a known, proven, observable phenomenon, especially one with greater likelihood/intensity as you climb in altitude, like planes do, and that likelihood/intensity also scales with solar cycle intensity, which we are currently experiencing the peak of?
Or perhaps you think the Aurora Borealis are because of Aliens too?
The article rebuked that claim, saying that day was average. There other things that can cause bitflips ti be more likely like heat.
It did not. The article itself acknowledged that there is certainly reason to consider it a possibility, predicated on the fact that the people that make the thing stated as such and that experts in the field agree it's also a risk in general, but wasn't particularly high that day.
Average activity is not no activity. Average risk is not No risk.
And even if it wasn't the issue in that instance, it's not hard to reason why it's worth hardening against such a possibility in the absence of any other explanation given just days later "sensors mounted on UK weather balloons at 40,000ft (12km) measured one of the largest radiation events to hit Earth in roughly two decades."
Airbus didn't ground these plains because there was "No reason to believe" a known proven and observed phenomenon might have been the culprit and/or that it is on the level with something we as yet have no proof of to be generous in characterizing your comparing it to aliens.
"If the signal looks amazingly strong but unexpected and sharp, it's probably a cosmic ray" was what I was trained for.
Random but flips are pretty much always bad hardware. That's what the literature says when you actually study it. And that's also what we find at work: we wrote a program that occupied most of the free ram and checked it for bit flips. Deployed on a sizeable fleet of machines. We found exactly that: yes there were bit flips, but they were highly concentrated on specific machines and disappeared after changing hardware.
So shielding is not a solution that can be applied in a vehicle. You need something like an underground bunker to be sure that no cosmic radiation can penetrate it.
The only reason that makes rare the events caused by cosmic radiation is that if those particles can pass through shields that means that in most cases they will also pass through the electronic devices without being absorbed and causing malfunction.
There was still hardware redundancy though. Operation of the plane's elevator switched to a secondary computer. Presumably it was also running the same vulnerable software, but they diverted and landed early in part to minimize this risk.
So not just redundancy but layers of redundancy.
0. Always use a) SECDED hardware ECC and b) checksums on network links and I/O everywhere.
1. When unable to 1.a), add (72,64) 8-bits Hamming code per 64-bits (or) N>2 redundancy copies on physically-separate silicon for critical data and code. This is a significant performance hit, but safety is more important in some uses. (Don't neglect the integrity and reliability of code storage, loading, and execution paths either.)
2. Consider using Space Shuttle high-availability, high-reliability "voting" of N identically-designed behavior, possibly different manufacturer system control elements.
Despite that, most of the existing planes have an older model, which has not been upgraded.
[0]https://xkcd.com/378/
we had a "historic bad solarweather" a bunch of years ago and i talked with a cyber cafe operator that "you could have more computers bluescreen on this week than usual".
to me it got really weird when he said later he really did, but honestly its 50/50 that could had been just incidental.
in another note there are some "rather intense" discussions when someone speedrunning a game gets a "unreproducible glitch" in their favor, some claim its a flaw from ageing dram hardware, but some always point that it could be a cosmic ray bitfliping the right bit. (https://tildes.net/~games/1eqq/the_biggest_myth_in_speedrunn...)
Oooh, in that case I have another xkcd you might like, involving mint candies and soft drinks…
> In any case, the software updates rolled out by the company appear to be quick and easy to install. Many airlines completed them within hours. The software works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight.
What do you think this adds? These things are sycophant confident idiots; they will agree and agree they're incorrect at the slightest challenge in the same interaction.