The Register:
Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots
US air safety bods call it 'potentially catastrophic' if reboot directive not implemented
[...] The US Federal Aviation Administration has ordered Boeing 787 operators to switch their aircraft off and on every 51 days to prevent what it called "several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios" – including the crashing of onboard network switches.
The airworthiness directive[*], due to be enforced from later this month, orders airlines to power-cycle their B787s before the aircraft reaches the specified days of continuous power-on operation.
The power cycling is needed to prevent stale data from populating the aircraft's systems, a problem that has occurred on different 787 systems in the past.
[*] The link in the article from The Register was copied correctly, and points to https://ad.easa.europa.eu/ad/US-2020-06-14. The actual FAA Airworthiness Directive appears to be: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/03/23/2020-06092/airworthiness-directives-the-boeing-company-airplanes.
At least I can take comfort that software in aircraft is probably more reliable than software in automobiles.
Previously:
(2019-07-25) Airbus A350 Software Bug Forces Airlines to Turn Planes Off and On Every 149 Hours
(2015-05-02) 787 Software Bug Can Shut Down Planes' Generators.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @03:01AM (4 children)
Did Microsoft write the software?
(Score: 5, Funny) by toddestan on Friday April 03 2020, @03:38AM (3 children)
This is a Boeing cock-up. If it was written by Microsoft it would crash after 49.7 days.
(Score: 3, Funny) by istartedi on Friday April 03 2020, @07:29AM
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Friday April 03 2020, @09:00AM (1 child)
My own first thought, seriously.
For younger readers, Win95 and 98 really would crash after 49.7 days, because of a timer overflow. The real joke however was that it was years before anyone noticed, because Win9x would invariably crash for some other reason long before that time was reached. It was December 2001 before it became generally known and Microsoft admitted it.
https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/ [cnet.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by toddestan on Friday April 03 2020, @09:03PM
And of course, since history would never ever repeat itself:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2553549/all-the-tcp-ip-ports-that-are-in-a-time-wait-status-are-not-closed-aft [microsoft.com]
Fun fact: I actually got a Windows Vista system to hit that bug.