After taking off from Cancun, Mexico, on October 30, a crowded JetBlue Airways flight seemed to be preparing for another uneventful journey. It had reached its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, at which point the plane was almost flying on its own and passengers began to relax, unbuckle their seatbelts, and disturb their rear neighbors by leaning too far. Destination: Newark, New Jersey.
Then its height suddenly dropped.
The pilot regained control of the Airbus A320, but the crash was so violent and sudden that at least three passengers suffered cuts to their heads after hitting the ceiling. Fifteen people were taken to hospital after emergency landing in Florida.
The reason is unclear. But after grounding more than 6,000 planes last week, Airbus finally revealed the suspected culprit: cosmic rays from outer space that disrupted the planes’ computer systems.
This may sound like a “the dog ate my homework” excuse, but it’s actually a real phenomenon. Scientists have called these incidents “single disturbing events” – a real nightmare for our art director, who bravely produced the illustrations for this story despite his crippling fear of flying.
In our daily, solipsistic existence, we tend to think of the Earth as a small, enclosed sanctuary isolated from the larger universe, but the reality is that it is constantly bombarded with energy from the distant universe. Many of these are emissions from stars that exploded in distant supernovae; our own sun also produces weaker cosmic rays during outbursts such as solar flares—just last month it struck Earth with the largest solar storm in more than two decades.
These rays are composed of tiny subatomic particles that travel at nearly the speed of light. When they hit a computer’s memory chip, they can inadvertently flip a bit’s value from a 1 to a 0, or vice versa. This is called a bit flip. In the computer world, they are cosmic acts of divine intervention.
Sometimes divinity can be benevolent. It’s widely believed that bit flips caused by cosmic rays could allow Super Mario 64 speedrunning to shave a few seconds off the running time by changing values related to the height of a character’s jump. But they can also wreak havoc on computers controlling more important systems, such as when a bit flip unexpectedly changed the number of votes a candidate received in the 2003 Belgian election.
In the case of the airliner, Airbus blamed “intense solar radiation” at the time of the accident in a statement, which could have destroyed “data critical to flight control functions.” according to British Broadcasting Corporation According to reports, the bit flip error occurred in the A320’s Elac system, which controls parts of the aircraft’s wings and tail.
For years, experts have warned that cosmic rays have the potential to damage flight systems. Now more than ever, aircraft are controlled by electronic computer systems rather than mechanical systems, leaving more systems with unexpected behavior after a bit-flip interrupt.
As part of one of the largest groundings in aviation history, Airbus is updating its planes’ software to prevent bit flips and “quickly refresh corrupted parameters so it doesn’t have time to have an impact on flight controls.” British Broadcasting Corporation.
Although officials blame it on solar radiation, some experts are skeptical of that explanation. Keith Ryden, professor of space engineering at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, told Solar Radiation magazine: “On that day… nothing special happened with solar radiation.” British Broadcasting Corporation. “From my perspective, it’s a bit of a mystery.”
However, if the sun is not the source of the light, then the damaging rays are likely to come from deep space.
More about space: NASA says Boeing’s sabotaged Starliner spacecraft will not be allowed to carry astronauts on its next mission