All current means of transport use some type of computer or electronic system . Trains, cars, trucks, buses or airplanes, all have systems as simple as an ECU or complete computers as in the Tesla. Including computers on airplanes also means that the reboot-to-troubleshoot trick works on them.
Last spring, the US Federal Aviation Administration asked Boeing 787 pilots to restart the planes every 51 days to prevent catastrophic failures that could cause the craft to fail. The objective of this restart is to prevent the data that remains stagnant in the plane from saturating the memory and processing capacity of the on-board computers, something that has already happened on several occasions in this type of aircraft.
Wrong data that can cause accidents
In the event that more than 51 days pass, pilots may see erroneous data about the flight , including aircraft speed, airspeed, altitude, or engine operating data. The speeding and alert sound may also stop working. Any failure in these data can have serious consequences on a flight.
51 days may seem like a long time, but it’s not uncommon for planes to fly non-stop for weeks to pay off your purchase as quickly as possible. In the event that there is a night when you are not flying, the aircraft can stay connected while maintenance is being done.
The fault lies in the Common Core System (CCS) , which stops validating by date the data that comes from the plane’s internal CDN , which is the way Boeing calls its Ethernet network that goes through the plane. This system built under a more robust standard than that of our houses, called ARINC 664. The system that validates the data can stop detecting the moment in which it is generated, so a temperature or speed reading can be minutes ago or hours.
A 787 in Japan suffered a fire in 2014 due to a failure in a battery, whose sensor had been collecting erroneous temperatures. In Poland, the autopilot suddenly decided that it was halfway through the previous flight, and maneuvered itself to get back on the “right” path.
The restart is usually done with the plane on the ground
These failures, unfortunately, are usually quite common, where the 787 suffered a similar failure that required reboots every 248 days or else the plane could turn off mid-flight due to the failure of the 4 electrical generators it carries, from which it would only have 30-60 minutes of battery life available until power runs out. The Airbus A350 also required reboots every 149 hours until a patch was released to fix it.
Restarting a plane is quite fast, as it only takes about 30 seconds , and can even be done in the middle of the flight. However, it is best to do it on the ground, as the lights and screens turn off when you reboot. Imagine if that happens in the middle of a turbulent situation. So when you are getting on the plane you see that the lights go off and come back on after a while, it will be that they have restarted it.
