I wonder if the corruption could have been caused by a cosmic ray bit flip. It would be funny to think that one single tiny subatomic particle knocked down our entire flight system.
Somebody inadvertently put a poop emoji in a text field.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...
File this under "early Google's infrastructure was a low grade cosmic ray detector."
Source: 10 years airbourne geophysics, radiometric calibrations.
Addendum:
In-flight upset 154 km west of Learmonth, WA 7 October 2008 VH-QPA Airbus A330-303 [1] was a probable (but uncertain) example of cosmic ray events causing multiple spikes in one of three air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs) that also went on to cause a failure mode of the "best of three" reporting system leading to a pitch down in which [2]
> 110 of the 303 passengers and nine of the 12 crew members were injured; 12 of the occupants were seriously injured and another 39 received hospital medical treatment.
HOWEVER .. despite 250 events per second in a 42 litre volume, it took 128 million hours of unit operation to see a failure mode.
It's a lot of billiard balls going through a lot of space and a high bar for "something bad" ( just the right bit flip ) to happen.
[1] https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...
[2] https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/2...
( Final Report TAB )
They are not rare, just because you don't detect them (consumer hardware) means nothing.
>>study done by IBM in the 1990’s that referenced 1 cosmic ray bit flip per 256MB of memory per month
https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2022/04/13/this-week-in-glean-...
> Cosmic ray flux depends on altitude. Computers operated on top of mountains experience an order of magnitude higher rate of soft errors compared to sea level. The rate of upsets in aircraft may be more than 300 times the sea level upset rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error#Cosmic_rays_creatin...
Yes thats why you have max altitude for normal servers/hardware and it's also more disastrous on modern HW -> smaller transistors.
I lost the thread on that story before the investigation concluded the actual cause was autopilot error. It is, in some ways, more comforting to me to know that the issue wasn't novel atmospheric phenomena, but instead relatively-mundane cosmic radiation flipping one packet of data from the sensors to the avionics that the avionics lacked sufficient redundancy to detect or discard. As a result, the autopilot believed the plane had suddenly pitched 90 degrees and drastically corrected to escape stall.