Timeline for How dissimilar are redundant flight control computers?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Oct 5, 2017 at 22:25 | comment | added | alephzero | ... some mandatory engine certification procedures have budgets of the order of 20 or 30 million USD - and double or triple that if the tests are not passed first time and need to be re-done. That sort of money would pay for a lot of CPU chips! But even USD 20m is a fairly small number in a complete "new engine" project with a budget of the order of USD 1bn. | |
| Oct 5, 2017 at 22:17 | comment | added | alephzero | @FreeMan Even if the cost of a mil-grade 68000 was a "ridiculously high" number like $10,000 per part, that would be negligible compared with the cost of certifying a newer chip design. For example even one hour of flight test time would cost more than $10,000 just to fly the aircraft, not counting the cost of actually monitoring the behaviour of anything inside it. | |
| Oct 5, 2017 at 18:39 | comment | added | Peter Kämpf | @FreeMan: Those are military grade chips which have passed a very long approval process. Part of the process is to make sure that somebody will be able to manufacture those chips in decades to come. Of course with plenty of government financial support. These are really juicy contracts, so the manufacturers will not die out or lose interest. Hint: It's not alone the toilet seats that are more expensive than their equivalent in massive gold. | |
| Oct 5, 2017 at 17:12 | comment | added | FreeMan | That begs a whole new question (which may not be appropriate for this forum) of how does Airbus keep Intel & Moto producing these ancient CPUs and/or how many do they (their supplier) have stockpiled? Intel & Moto have long since recouped their dev & startup costs, so producing more should be nearly pure profit, but it costs a lot to keep fab plants running for tiny quantities,. /OT musings | |
| Oct 5, 2017 at 16:55 | comment | added | Peter Kämpf | @FreeMan: The Eurofighter uses also the Motorola 68000. Barring some midlife upgrade, those have to be available for the next 30 years ore more. To keep the last one flying will probably require to steal the chips from a museum. At least the more modern Airbus computers use the PPC. | |
| Oct 5, 2017 at 14:56 | comment | added | FreeMan | Holy carp! The Motorola 68010 and Intel 80186? Those are positively ancient!! Though, I guess when the A320 first rolled off the line in 1987 they were pretty new... | |
| Oct 5, 2017 at 12:35 | comment | added | RedSonja | In my experience sometimes even the underlying algorithms have to be different (if possible). | |
| Oct 5, 2017 at 12:08 | comment | added | Martin Schröder | Famously the 777 has three redundant computers created by different teams/companies in different programming languages. | |
| Oct 3, 2017 at 22:19 | history | answered | Peter Kämpf | CC BY-SA 3.0 |