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posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 26 2019, @06:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-back-on-again? dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

Some models of Airbus A350 airliners still need to be hard rebooted after exactly 149 hours, despite warnings from the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) first issued two years ago.

In a mandatory airworthiness directive (AD) reissued earlier this week, EASA urged operators to turn their A350s off and on again to prevent "partial or total loss of some avionics systems or functions".

The revised AD, effective from tomorrow (26 July), exempts only those new A350-941s which have had modified software pre-loaded on the production line. For all other A350-941s, operators need to completely power the airliner down before it reaches 149 hours of continuous power-on time.

Concerningly, the original 2017 AD was brought about by "in-service events where a loss of communication occurred between some avionics systems and avionics network" (sic). The impact of the failures ranged from "redundancy loss" to "complete loss on a specific function hosted on common remote data concentrator and core processing input/output modules".

In layman's English, this means that prior to 2017, at least some A350s flying passengers were suffering unexplained failures of potentially flight-critical digital systems.

Not a power of two. I wonder why 149 hours?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 26 2019, @01:58PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 26 2019, @01:58PM (#871467) Journal

    > 149 hours is 536,400 seconds, but what is the value in milliseconds?

    Given all the attempts here to try to fit this into some kind of integer overflow, I'll go a different direction.

    Maybe they've looked at when the overflow would occur, looked at all of the flight schedules, and picked a standard reboot time that just happens NOT to be during any particular airline fright.

    Now we only hope none of the flights are delayed, or early.

    But everyone knows that the proper procedure to fix Windows bugs it so reinstall.

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