Engineers investigate effects of space weather on airliners

The company is conducting commissioned research into the phenomenon, developing sensors for advanced warning and designing novel system architectures with better tolerances.

The increase in microelectronics systems in aircraft in the past few decades means that they are potentially more vulnerable to geomagnetic events originating from space.

The main threat to aircraft systems specifically is from neutrons that are created in the atmosphere through the collision of space phenomenon such as solar flares with the Earth’s magnetic field.

‘Think of what’s happening as being rather like the Large Hadron Collider going on all the time at the top of the atmosphere,’ Keith Ryden, senior consultant on space environments and effects, told The Engineer.

‘They [the neutrons] are very penetrating because they’re not charged and they go through the aircraft and into equipment. If they reach a silicon device, because they’re travelling so fast, basically a nuclear reaction happens inside the silicon that causes a certain quantity of charge to be developed.’