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Comment by abstractbeliefs | Hacker News Reader

They don't, they reboot it on the ground. The implication is that airlines need to find at least one hour in each 248 days to service this bug.

This shouldn't be a problem, but in the highly optimised logistics of air travel, finding a solid hour to just reboot the GCU is expensive.

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Even the "minimal" A-check process happens often enough to avoid a 248-day limit, and typically grounds an aircraft overnight.

People really do not realize how much maintenance commercial aviation involves.

It should be fairly easy for anyone to figure out that planes generally aren't used around-the-clock. For example, I routinely take a flight which arrives at 11pm, and I know that nothing is flying out of that airport again until the morning.

Having seen a similar bug on humble Netscalers, and found a much shorter reboot quite difficult to schedule, I do believe the operational challenge here.

The difference being that setting up NS HA, then failing over to the secondary and rebooting in turns is a lot easier than doing the equivalent on a plane. So even considering the operational requirements are the same (no time to reboot but if you don't, people die), you still have a lot more flexibility.

The problem with an airplane is that by the time you find such an issue it becomes prohibitively expensive to fix if an "architecture" change is required. This is why workarounds are provided instead.

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