Plane crashed suddenly in the USA, 15 people were injured. The origin would not have been mechanical failure or human error.
It was on October 30th, in Tampa (USA): a plane lost altitude suddenlymade an emergency landing and 15 people were injured.
The JetBlue flight was connecting Cancún and Newark when, in the Florida area, it abruptly lost altitude without the pilots realizing why; they did not register any previous anomaly in the previous seconds or minutes.
They still controlled the plane quickly but the sudden negative acceleration was enough to throw passengers against the ceiling.
A The origin of this incident was not mechanical failure or human error. In the days following the incident, there was talk of a sudden escalation in solar activity, affecting sensors or electronic systems.
At the end of November, Airbus admitted in an official statement that “intense solar radiation can corrupt critical data on the operation of flight controls”, recalls the magazine.
But that wouldn’t have been quite the case.
The portal spoke to experts, who explained that the levels of solar radiation on that day – October 30th – were insufficient to cause any electronic damage on that flight.
The origin would have been different: a cosmic ray, that is, a extremely energetic particle produced by explosion of a massive star in supernova.
Cosmic rays can, in fact, interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit. One “bit flip”changing the state of a bit or binary number to the opposite state (0 or 1), which can cause communication problems. They can also cause hardware failures and burn out components.
The particles cross the Universe practically at the speed of light, collide with the Earth’s atmosphere and create showers of secondary particles that can reach electronic components inside aircraft, causing a single disturbance event.
In critical systems such as flight computers, a single bit flip can generate inaccurate and strange commands.
