Former pilot explains solar cycle’s impact on aircraft, as urgent repairs called for A320s

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Airbus has ordered urgent repairs for around 6,000 A320 aircraft after it was found intense radiation from the sun could corrupt data for flight controls. Some Jetstar planes have been grounded and there are delays at airports after cancellations. The carrier says it's not yet known how many of its planes are impacted. Sidney Dekker is a former pilot and professor at Griffith University, and he says the solar cycle could be the reason behind the issue.

Transcript

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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