The explosion of a distant star could have caused a major malfunction which forced a passenger jet to make an emergency landing and led to Airbus grounding 6,000 planes, an expert has said.
The incident on October 30 saw an Airbus A320 suffer a sudden and uncontrolled drop in altitude during a flight from Mexico to New Jersey.
The pilots quickly regained control but around 15 passengers were injured, forcing them to make an emergency landing at Tampa airport in Florida, where several of the people hurt were taken to hospital.
They were at a loss as to the cause of the incident, which was investigated by Airbus.
A statement released by the company this week said its initial findings indicated there was a malfunction in one of the plane’s computers.
The computer in question was the one which controls the elevator ailerons, which are used to adjust the plane’s pitch – and in this case were unintentionally set to steer the plane downwards.
The trigger appeared to be a fierce burst of space radiation, which is known to cause problems in some electronic circuits.
EU and US flight authorities said such errors could lead to an ‘uncommanded’ steering movement so strong that plane’s ‘structural capability’ could not withstand it.
Around 50 variants of the Airbus A320, A319 and A321 planes were found to be vulnerable.
This prompted all 6,000 operational aircraft of these kinds to be grounded while the problem was fixed, which saw all of them require software updates while some 900 needed hardware updates.
But Airbus’ findings have come under scrutiny for only suggesting ‘intense solar radiation’ as a possible cause.
Experts were quick to point out there were no notable solar flare events around that time.
Matthew Owens, professor of space physics at the University of Reading in the UK, told BBC News the ‘timing and location wouldn’t immediately strike me as a solar event’.
A researcher who has studied the effects of solar radiation on aircraft for decades has said a more plausible explanation would be a cosmic ray – a stream of high-energy particles shot out by a supernova.
These particles were released when very distant stars exploded millions of years ago, setting them on a path to eventually reach the Earth.
Clive Dyer, a space weather expert at the University of Surrey told Space.com these rays ‘can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit.
‘They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. They can mess up information and make things go wrong,’ he added.
‘But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out.’
Scientists have repeatedly warned in recent years that computer chips are becoming more vulnerable to bit flips as manufacturers make them smaller and smaller.
Other passenger vehicles such as cars are becoming increasingly reliant on microchip control as more computerised features are added.
Most airlines operating the affected aircraft were able to fix them in a few hours, though those requiring hardware changes took longer.
As of Monday, Airbus said fewer than 100 planes still needed to be modified, with minor disruption to affected services over the rest of the week.
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