Space weather a growing risk for air traffic

A software safety bug that caused dozens of passenger planes to be grounded across Australia has been branded a “warning shot for the future” by experts.

According to Australian researchers, the glitch was not a one-time occurrence but was triggered by space weather, a phenomenon that is increasingly affecting next-generation aircraft electronics.

In November, 90 flights were canceled and 15,000 Jetstar customers’ travel plans were disrupted when airlines around the world were told to immediately ground their Airbus A320 aircraft.

There were cancellations at domestic airports across the country so engineers could reverse the software upgrade on the affected aircraft.

The worldwide recall of 6,000 aircraft was one of the largest recalls in aviation history.

The incident was sparked by an incident in the US in October, when a JetBlue A320 flying from Mexico to New Jersey suddenly lost altitude, injuring several passengers and forcing it to land in Florida.

Investigators attributed the incident to a malfunction following a recent software update on one of the computers that control moving parts in the plane’s wings and tail.

However, they found intense bursts of solar radiation that could disrupt flight control data on the plane, potentially causing the plane to yaw unexpectedly.

US and European officials later warned that such errors triggered by radiation could, in a worst-case scenario, lead to uncontrolled altitude changes “so severe that they could exceed the aircraft’s structural capacity.”

As 34 of Jetstar’s A320/1 fleet were found to carry the same software anomaly as JetBlue aircraft, the carrier’s engineers moved to fix the problem overnight by rolling out updates.

Elsewhere, nearly 900 aircraft worldwide needed equipment replacement.

Fortunately, Australia has a facility that studies the effects of space radiation on electronic devices and helps manage the risk.

The Center for Accelerator Science at Lucas Heights in Sydney is managed by Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organization and is built around four high-voltage ion accelerators capable of delivering particle beams.

In practical terms, accelerators can reproduce most of the radiation environments that an aircraft, satellite or chip would encounter.

At 10 to 12 kilometers, the typical flying altitude of a passenger jet, the flux of secondary particles produced by cosmic rays is hundreds of times greater than at sea level.

However, the Lucas Heights center is able to create the same environment on site under controlled conditions.

Experts say sunspot numbers and powerful eruptions in 2024-25 exceed previous predictions, and agencies such as NASA warn that this era could bring more frequent extreme space weather events than in the last two decades.

As electronic devices are pushed to become smaller, faster, and lower voltage, they often become more sensitive to this type of radiation.

Deputy Leader of the Center for Accelerator Science Dr. According to Mitra Safavi-Naeini, “Airbus’ recall should therefore be read not as a one-off disruption but rather as a warning shot for the future.”

This event was a clear sign that space weather and natural radiation have now become a practical engineering and economic challenge for the aerospace, transportation, telecommunications and defense industries, he says.

ANSTO’s wider space radiation program recently tested a radiation-hardened chip prototype designed by Australian and international collaborators that can withstand high doses of radiation.

Meanwhile, the earth is entering the peak of Solar Cycle 25, the current 11-year cycle of solar activity.

Any critical system that depends on microelectronics in a radiation environment, including commercial and military aircraft operating at cruising altitude, is likely to become vulnerable.

“The engineering question becomes: ‘What level of radiation can my system withstand, how often will it experience something worse, and what happens when it fails?’” says Dr Safavi-Naeini.

“These are the questions that radiation hardness testing is designed to answer.”

The accident in November was also compared to the incident in October 2008, when approximately 40 passengers suffered fractures and injuries on a Qantas flight from Singapore to Perth.

The plane, with 315 people on board, unexpectedly fell hundreds of meters below twice within a few minutes.

While some passengers were thrown in the cabin, some were hit by luggage that broke away from the overhead bins.

Investigators determined that a software bug that caused the crash was triggered by some type of environmental factor.

A cosmic bit change was never confirmed as the cause but was left as a possible scenario after several other scenarios were ruled out.