00:00I think that the most important thing to understand first is that indeed these are fly-by-wire
00:07airplanes. So it is computer signals that eventually travel from either the autopilot
00:12or the control in the cockpit go out to servos that hydraulically then move the controls at the
00:19flying surfaces of the airplane. In this case, an incident on the 30th of October to an Airbus
00:28operated by JetBlue dropped about 100 feet in about seven seconds, injuring some 15 people,
00:36including a couple of kids. The autopilot was able to manage the disruption, but the pilots,
00:43of course, in that case are looking at each other going, what? Did you do this? Where does this come
00:48from? What this demonstrates though, I think that's the most important conclusion is that the system
00:54is working as designed. And I don't mean necessarily the software, but the global system
00:59of aviation safety. But is it a concern that the planes have been flying like this up until now?
01:06For the, yes, that would be a fair question to ask, Joe. It is a little bit, on the other hand,
01:13you don't want to be too alarmist. You first want to figure out what is this actually? And as soon as
01:18things like solar radiation get involved, it becomes very difficult to predict exactly how
01:23this works out. Solar storms, we're currently, Joe, that's important to understand, we're currently
01:29at the, almost at or near the peak of what is an 11-year solar cycle, where the sun is not very busy
01:37to where it's really busy. And even so busy that it will flip its magnetic poles around and
01:43lots of solar flares and other stuff coming out of the corona, which generally is known to disrupt
01:50all kinds of electrical and magnetic systems on Earth. If you fly above Earth, you're even closer
01:56to it. And so it took a little bit of time. And that makes sense for them to establish that,
02:03hang on, that's probably what disrupted it. How complex is it to fix this issue then?
02:08The fix is actually fairly simple, because it's like if you have a new computer and with new
02:17software on your desktop, and it's not working, then the manufacturer comes to use it. Why don't
02:23you just reinstall the older version of the software? Because we know that that's not vulnerable
02:27to this problem. And that's what they're doing. They're basically telling operators. Now we're
02:32talking quite a few operators. There's 6,000 of these things plus flying around.
02:37And I think about 85% is affected. So there's a fair number of airplanes that need a couple of
02:44hours to go back to the previous software. Now, a few airplanes have updated hardware that doesn't
02:50accommodate the older software. So they need to go back to the older hardware and the older software.
02:55We are already seeing disruptions and delays. Give us a sense of the scale of this and how long
03:00it might last. Thank you, Joe. Yes. For the Australian context, the biggest operator is,
03:05of course, Jetstar, if I may mention them. They've got 56 of these planes. It's unclear yet,
03:13nor have they said how many of those are actually affected by this change. But a few will certainly
03:19be. And they've made an announcement that some flights will have some delays in departing. Again,
03:24it needs to be grounded for about two hours. But then you also need the right expertise when the
03:28airplane is in the hangar to do the software update. And that's a little bit of a crunch.
03:33We've had this problem in Australia for a while. Not enough aviation maintenance engineers to go
03:39around. Worldwide, it'll reverberate for a couple of weeks before it settles. But yes,
03:44it'll cause a lot of disruptions. All right.
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