I'm kind of surprised it requires a software fix. With the amount of maintenance checks and checklist procedures in aviation, "reboot plane every 2 weeks" doesn't sound like a big issue. What's worrysome is that the manufacturer didn't know about it and didn't put it on the checklists.
I think this is one of the areas that airlines are super good at. Every single plane needs strict regular maintenance and tons of checklists in order to take off, so something like a 50-day requirement for a reboot would be in that list of items, and if the people aren't following those lists of items you're going to have things like turbine failures, so they get done.
Maybe if there's a really badly run airline it might be a problem, but there are much more severe problems than software in a case like that.
Boeing gets away with this software issue because it's not really a big issue. The scary point the media can tell you because you don't have context to understand why it's mundane.
If regular maintenance does not including rebooting the computer, this is news-worthy.
If the maintenance schedule does document system reboots, this is boring and business as expected... no different than periodically reinflating tires or replacing oil. I'd have no concerns flying on such a plane.
Don't you mean >N days? If a maintenance schedule requires maintenance every 60 days but the plane needs to be rebooted every 50 days, that would be cause for concern.
What about running repairs in something like Cassandra? In some cases it is by design. Here I'm a little surprised an airliner would even go that long without a reboot
Nothing. I respond to a question posing why it might be a problem. It didn't say "in a 787" it was "in general" I suggest a class of problem which it might surface in. The wider question.
All aircraft have schedules of maintenance. Requirements to reboot a computer periodically isn't onerous. It's not onerous but the insane costs of recertification are. Fixing this problem to not require reboot would be very expensive. Not just the FAA process burdens but the wider costs. 787 battery problems probably wrecked the entire profit of the model for years.
The Max flight safety issue on another Boeing aircraft may mean its never profitable. The industry is wierd.
As mentioned else-thread, the plane requires a certain level of inspection after the software update, which merely takes a few weeks and lots of human effort.
Not exact same issue, but one with similar symptoms to the "reboot every 51 days" one for 787.
Reading deeper, I'm more worried about how there's no patch for the Boeing issue still, at least I can't find one in FAA AD database, I assumed there would be one already... (the affected A350 had a software patch available at the time AD for "reboot before 148 hours" was issued)
Airplanes already have an elaborate schedule for mandatory periodic service. Pressing a "reset" button once every 30 days is pretty trivial compared to dismantling the entire engine every couple of years.
What made this bug dangerous is that nobody knew about it, that's the main problem that needs to be solved.
It is a very well know issue with every plane. Sometimes there are no solutions to a problem. You need these hacky solutions. The title is clearly catchy with everything that is going on with Boeing.
But the point is, this reboot process is very well managed and known. So I won't call it scary.
Agreed... while this is a software design issue I too would be surprised to see a plane powered up for that long continuously. Needs to be fixed, yes... causing a lot of issues at the moment? Probably not.
According to earlier articles about this issue, planes currently in wide use need to be 'rebooted' at a similar frequency, it's just specific subsystems that get rebooted (I think the F-35's former problem was a sensor), the planes keep flying, and missions don't often last that long anyway (IIRC all the details).
The toughest problem the program is having is matching the timing of the aircraft’s fusion software with its sensors’ software. “As we add different radar modes and as we add different and capabilities to the DAS system and to the EOTS system, the timing is misaligned,” and then you have to reboot it. Bogdan said he’s aiming for eight to nine hours between such software failures when a radar or DAS or EOTS needs to be rebooted, which is what legacy aircraft boast. Right now they are at four to five hours between such events. “That’s not a good metric.”
>the FAA's new rules require operators to reboot the plane's electrical system every now and then because "all three flight control modules on the 787 might simultaneously reset if continuously powered on for 22 days." The effect of this simultaneous reset "could result in flight control surfaces not moving in response to flight crew inputs for a short time and consequent temporary loss of controllability."
The first versions of the Dreamliner had some kind of software bug that ended up generating a requirement of a hard reboot every X hours until it could be fixed. I don’t know if I would have the guts to board the plane after seeing that!
This is a bug with ""several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios". Yet, its not been fixed in the ~10 years since it first flew. Nor is it the first, there have been a number of fairly critical bugs on this airplane that took a long time to diagnose before changes were submitted for certification.
So, In ~10 years and many major revisions of the aircraft, multiple re-certifications, etc none of them have bothered to fix it. One might argue they are afraid of changing the software because it might cause other catastrophic failures, but that leads down a thought process just as severe.
I am going out on a limb here but I seem to remember reading somewhere that airliners do have maintenance schedules that are very strictly kept, for obvious reasons. If the maintenance schedule is N days, then any news article pointing out how amusing it is that an airliner needs to be rebooted every >N days is at best sensationalism, at worst pure fearmongering.
I don't know for a fact this is the case here for the 787, but I think there are far better things to worry about when it comes to technical security in airliners than how often they need to be rebooted. For example, whether the on-board WiFi is sufficiently separated from the in-flight systems, and (as discussed recently here on HN) whether the advent of touchscreens for critical flight systems is sufficiently durable, tested and redundant.
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