Except for confusing solar and [galactic] cosmic radiation the story seems factual.
From The Telegraph, December 5:
Cosmic [sic] radiation levels are at a 20-year high, affecting aircraft closer to Earth
In late October, hundreds of passengers on JetBlue Flight 1230 from Cancun, Mexico, to New Jersey were enjoying the usual perks of a short-haul trip when every flyer’s worst nightmare struck.
The plane, an Airbus A320, was flying on autopilot at cruising altitude when the plane’s nose was suddenly forced towards the ground.
Dropping 100 feet in just seven seconds, the disaster was only averted when the pilots regained control and made an emergency landing in Florida. Several passengers were taken to the hospital after being flung around the cabin.
Airbus engineers quickly detected the problem: a burst of intense solar radiation had corrupted the plane’s complex software systems.
Europe’s aviation regulator quickly ordered the grounding of any planes that failed to undergo an immediate switch to older software thought to cope better with cosmic rays. Thousands of planes have since had their systems upgraded, but many were grounded while the fix was made.
In the wake of the scare, engineers and scientists are now working to evaluate whether the threat to aircraft from solar radiation, which is currently peaking at levels not seen for 20 years, has been underestimated.
Planes rely on computer systems that are vulnerable to solar radiation. Combined with the increasing intensity of storms, it looks like a major engineering headache.
FlightGlobal’s David Learmount, a former RAF pilot, warned that an aircraft’s GPS signals, radio communications, navigation systems, autopilots and engine controls were all exposed to being zapped from space.
“A modern aircraft is one huge network of computers, and for that reason, it is more vulnerable (to solar radiation),” he says.
“Most electronics are not bothered by ordinary amounts of radiation, but in solar storms, it gets stronger, and it can cause very serious problems. There is also nothing to tell you that you have been hit by solar rays, so pilots may not know what has happened.
“All you can do is switch things off and go back to basics.”
The threat to planes stems chiefly from the ability of a heavy dose of solar energy to scramble the binary code on which modern digital computers rely.
Because planes cruise at such high altitudes, levels of solar radiation are largely unfiltered by the Earth’s atmosphere. This means aircraft can be exposed to radiation levels 300 times those on the ground.
In the JetBlue case, Airbus engineers traced the issue to a computer system that controlled parts of the plane’s wings and tail responsible for making it bank and pitch up or down.
They concluded that the malfunction had been triggered by solar radiation disrupting individual bits of data within the computer, represented as a “0” or “1” in binary code.Bombardment by neutrons released when the radiation hits the atmosphere can cause the data to switch from one form to the other in a “bit flip”, corrupting the computer’s memory.
Following the JetBlue scare, the European Aviation Safety Agency (Easa) warned that in a worst-case scenario, an Airbus A320 could be plunged into a dive so steep that it exceeded its “structural capability”, ripping it apart.
Irfan Madani, who teaches aircraft design at Cranfield University, said the problem stemmed from the use of new semiconductor technology in an upgraded version of the computer.
He said: “It increases the processing speed and reduces power consumption, which is good for aircraft. But apparently, it is very vulnerable to solar activity.
“A direct hit can flip the bit, which can be catastrophic if it happens to the flight control computer.”
Aircraft are equipped with backup computers, but that does not help if both are identical and running the same software, he said.The incident came as the planet was soaked in radiation at the peak of the latest 11-year solar cycle, which is thought to have reached maximum intensity in July.
The cycle has been more violent than initially predicted, with more frequent and intense solar flares.
Scientists last month detected the highest radiation levels at cruising altitudes since 2006, following a solar storm so severe that it caused a spike detectable at ground level....
....MUCH MORE
Deadlier but more insidious is the fact that both solar and cosmic radiation can trigger cancer in frequent fliers, especially flight crews.
If interested see September 2019's "Attn: Flight Attendants, Pilots, Frequent Flyers: Cosmic Rays Can Kill You ":
When I posted "The Fuzzy Logic of Fleeing for Your Life" with its outro story of Air France flight-358, Paris to Toronto and how the flight attendants got all 309 passengers and crew off the plane in 125 seconds, despite 4 of 8 exits being unusable, I was thinking of one flight attendant in particular who used to tell me that even though I gave her a hard time, should the worst happen she would probably be the one to save my life.
She was an interesting woman. There was the time, back when there was an East Berlin, that she caused an international incident that required the U.S. State Department to intervene. After many years of flying international she got into investments and then real estate, quite the hustler and quite sharp.
I thought I'd look her up and tell her about the 'Fuzzy Logic' post and though I hadn't talked to her in years the contact information was still good and I was told she was dead.
Cancer.
Quite young.
And I remembered a study from last year in the journal Environmental Health:
Cancer prevalence among flight attendants compared to the general populationHere's the Harvard Gazette's blurb on the paper.
Back to the study, after adjusting for smoking and weight, a couple of the possible causes that were highlighted were disrupted circadian rhythms (shift work, time zones) and exposure to cosmic radiation.
Which ties into something that SpaceWeather.com has been doing for a few years....
Related, and featuring a gritty cover of "King of Pain", November 2014's:
Among the things to be thankful for that we so often take for granted are things like the magnetosphere...