Flutterby™! : Canadian Jet Reboots 2005-08-31 13:56:07.006734+00

Canadian Jet Reboots

2005-08-31 13:56:07.006734+00 by ziffle 4 comments

I came back from Oh! Canada this week - the air plane is one of those small Bombardier Jets - made in Canada I think -

we had to wait while the pilot shut down the engines, so he could 'Reset the Electrical Sytem'

Now we discussed Windows on aircraft here before (how do I link to it?) (2005-01-26 15:24:21.432494-08 Fly by Wire)

So I sat there the whole time wondering if we were flying using Windows XP?

I mean I have issue getting the monitors to work with different audio drivers - so should I have worried?

It landed ok, but still.. shut down the motors to reboot the electrical system?

Ziffle, Eh?

I would bet, since the motors were under control enough to shut down, the problem was not critical. But it was probably safer to shut down the motors while flipping some breakers so the co-pilot's inverter for the charger for the MP3 player would work.

--On our small flight in Alaska, I was suprised and impressed that the small planes still used magneto's for ignition, and they had two of them which were each tested prior to takeoff. Lots of good stuff to be said for magnetos.

Yeah, it's often amazing to look at aviation technology, especially general aviation technology, because they use what they know works, and nowadays everyone is fairly resistant to change because the public's tolerance for risk (and ability to sue afterwards) is so huge. I've long wondered if you could take modern automobile engine technology and make a small airplane that was perhaps not as quiet as a modern car cabin, but certainly a hell of a lot less loud that what we have.

Automotive technology does not transfer well to aviation. Car engines produce their horsepower at much higher RPMs than prop planes can use without gearing down the output shaft. Adding the gearbox adds one more item to break and to maintain.

#Comment Re: made: 2005-09-01 10:56:02.893543+00 by: TheSHAD0W [edit history]

This story was told by people from Motorola and is supposedly included in every microcontroller training course Motorola gives.

Test flights of F-16's were being conducted in Israel. The F-16's were doing low height rounds. On approach to the Dead Sea, the whole navigation system suddenly reset itself. The daring pilot landed the bird. HQ called up Motorola and ordered a team on the spot ASAP. The ground tests went perfectly, but every time the bird went airborn, it rebooted.

The pilots were getting restless. Flying on the border of hostile territory without navcom, with the Arabs pointing their earth-to-air missiles at anything that moves, wasn't that pleasant. Neither was debugging the whole navcom in-flight. Then someone figured it out.

The height of the Dead Sea relative to world sea level is -50 meters. As soon as the F-16 reached sea level, the navcom did a divide by zero, crashed, and rebooted.