Tour of the server room in the Airbus 350

Probably because it is 10 year old older hardware but thoroughly tested.

Using Chrome/JS/CSS on the latest Ryzen might be neat but when you need to transport 300 passengers daily around there is other sort of concerns then taking up 3 folks to the ISS every 6 months.

Youtube interrupted the video with an ad for me exactly at that timestamp, airplanes still need to catch up. So much monetization left on the table. Pilots must be among the most valuable target audience.

The lag looks more to me like waiting for network response with the imagery...

This screen (Onboard Information System) is run from from a laptop that is behind the seat, that's not directly part of the aircraft systems

Seriously, for $329 you can get an iPad with Foreflight that’s 100x smoother.

You would imagine the software and hardware should be several levels above what we would expect to get from even premium brands such as Apple M1 etc. Because it's hard to imagine the pilot trying to restart a piece of equipment in an emergency and getting a blank white screen and a "do you want to send an error report" message coming up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178C is a good starting point to understand certification requirements, and Wind River has a lot of documentation around VxWorks, which is actually quite modern supporting Rust etc.

The issue is that even a slight overlap with other cockpit functions puts you in a much stricter regime, and thus a simple modern map rendering framework doesn’t work, because its components and dependencies have never been sufficiently dissected - you rather have a 5 second lag, terrible as it sounds from a pragmatic safety perspective, than having anything, especially your own position, misplaced only once in a billion map redraws.

The practical solution is that most airlines by now fly with iPads, Jeppesen Flight Deck Pro but even GA stuff like ForeFlight, which is also owned by Boeing, is popular for quick lookups like taxi instructions etc.

As you can see in other videos, it's not usually that terrible. Apparently it's a screen showing the laptop's view (electronic flight bag), so it depends on the laptop and application.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyctm0as-Eg&t=118

Yes, and the correct response is: of all the flights that have crashed and killed people in the last 10 years: was the slowness of the UI for flight operations the root cause?

The answer to that is: "almost certainly a very tiny one". Aviation computing, while externally quite boring, is exciting in the sense that tremendous effort is put into making a computing system that ensures a flight makes it from its source to its destination without killing people.

It's amazing how just a few accidents in the 50s, 60s, and 70s led to an unbelievable improvement in safety, consider that the IT systems are really constrained. Makes you wonder what you could do with a modern PC if you really tried.

If you mean physically bigger than it is certainly true that avionics, like automative, uses larger components with higher ratings and avoids a lot of high pitch integrated circuits. This makes things easier test and likely to be more reliable. It also means you might have a single euro-card just to handle the input from a single airplane sensor even though in the non safety-critical world, we would easily mux them onto a single interface.

This isn't Uber or Tesla, they don't move fast and break things here.

Big replaceable components that can be serviced easily without special tools so long as no board-level fixes are necessary - and enough customization done at low enough numbers you don't build single board stuff for it, you build bigger reusable modules connected by common buses.

I work in telecommunications, back in the 90's fibre optic transport for plain old telephone service. Think back to how reliable your phone was before VOIP.

Then we hired a guy from an Aerospace company and he thought we were a bunch of reckless cowboys who didn't care a thing about quality.

Could be wrong but I think there's a lot of equipment for things like radios, radar, sensors, etc. that makes it look like there are more servers than there actually are.

Development of the plane type had started by, at latest, 2004, so, er, yeah.

It probably also reuses quite a lot from older planes; in that industry "if it ain't broke" is particularly relevant.

> this looks way way bigger than it should be.

I worked on the software for one of these A350 server blades nearly a decade ago, and I held the same belief at the time. There's some adage that system complexity grows to fill the organizational bureaucracy overseeing it, and that is my best explanation for the bloat. My employer (a contractor of Airbus) had offices in France, India, and the United States. Naturally, each office had to be in charge of their own separate blade(s), even if it was probably not optimal in terms of the overall system design to partition it that way.

Seven 9s for system failure would be horrific. There are ~30-40 million flights worldwide yearly [1], so that would result in 3-4 system failures of life-critical avionics yearly. As far as I am aware, malfunctioning software has not been implicated in any commercial airline fatality in nearly 30 years since the modern standards were adopted, and correctly functioning, though unsafe, software has only been implicated in the 737-MAX crashes. By that standard we have reasonable empirical evidence to conclude that the prevailing rate of system failure is at least 100x better at nine 9s.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-...

Yeah, I have been in a few server rooms that sound like a jet engine taking off. This server room actually sounds like a jet engine taking off.

Wonderful. A number of airlines have a two person in the cockpit rule so one of the pilots can’t deliberately crash the plane because they are suicidal. Which has happened a non-trivial amount of times.

First of all this place isn't meant to be occupied by people on a regular basis. Other than for safety inspections, maintenance and repairs, no one is supposed to be in there, especially not during flight.

Secondly, covers would introduce a lot of problems: additional weight, additional points of failure (e.g. damaging wires if broken/loose somehow), the need to be fireproof and not emitting toxic smoke if getting hot, accessibility issues (covers need to be fixed and removeable), longer inspection times (need to remove covers before inspecting cables), etc.

In this particular environment, covers are unnecessary and introduce more problems than they solve; as mentioned above, no one is supposed to be in there during regular operation.

It will take a lot more than an elbow to dislodge an avionics wiring harness. These things are tough

It’ll never happen on an airliner. Even most private jet charters no longer allow pax up front after a business jet crashed in Colorado. Turned out the customer was running late and rushed the pilots in poor weather conditions.

If you want to see the cockpit, I’ve gotten permission to enter twice while the pilots were on the ground waiting for passengers to board. Beyond that you can also take an intro flight lesson at your local school.

You need very good contacts inside an airline. Personal contacts with captain and the like. Sometimes you still can get jump seat flights (a rather uncomfortable seat used for ferrying extra crew) in the cockpit.

You need to work for an airline and have an airside pass. Generally only other pilots (on or off duty) or cabin crew (on duty) are allowed onto the flight deck. They generally don't want strangers on the flight deck because of security and they would not be trained in the emergency procedures.

Even people flying jump are usually outside the flightdeck sitting in the uncomfortable seats in the galley.

If you don’t care which cockpit, you could always take an intro flying lesson.

I spent a good chunk of my early 20s commuting across the Atlantic. Before 9/11, all you had to do was ask a flight attendant and they'd go check with the pilots and bring you up a short while later. I used to do it most flights overnight from New York, it broke up the journey which was otherwise pretty miserable in coach. I remember the pilots being delighted to have me up there, really for them it's as boring as it is for us in the back I was someone new to talk to for a bit. I remember one time some Virgin Atlantic pilots were more excited about my colorful socks than I was about their new glass cockpit 747-400.

I was never turned down and always felt very welcome. At most I had to wait a bit until some turbulence passed.

It's sad that has gone and won't ever come back. I have kids now and they'd get a _huge_ kick out of an experience like that.

EDIT: you can however still pay for some hours in an airline training simulator. It's astonishingly close to the real thing and might scratch that itch for you. Some airlines offer it, other training companies do.

Time machine.

In the 70s if you were under 10 and crossing the Atlantic, the co-pilot would proactively invite you to the cockpit, show you everything, then give you a model toy plane and a lapel pin.

Applies to the US (and maybe other countries, I don’t know) but I can’t overemphasize how much flight capacity the us military has.

We got incredible access to military jets in USAF ROTC (Air Force officer training in college) even before we got our commissions or had a security clearance. To get on base and the airfield there was a mild background check, but we were essentially civilians in fatigues that had been vouched for by our detachment’s Lt Col. Getting to literally run around the empty deck of a KC135 then pop into the cockpit and (under extremely careful supervision) operate some of the plane’s controls was a surreal experience. I didn’t make pilot and so did’t ever have the chance to fly in the training slot of the two-seater F15 (my dream), but I did get the opportunity to at least put my hands on the controls of several other USAF planes in-fight including a few jets.

You don’t have to be in ROTC. Getting a ride-along in a military jet as a civilian is not as easy as showing up and asking for a rode, but also not impossible. The military has the cash to put up planes for non commercial reasons and they consider these publicity flights a powerful public relations tool. Every Air Force base has a PR department that is always looking for positive stories. If you can come up with something that would lead to positive PR for the Air Force, they will totally let you ride along on a training run. I met a guy on a C-130 who was doing a ride along because his IT firm had a program where Air Force vets got some special consideration when they applied.

This is the relevant FARs section:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/121.547

Not in flight, but you can ask to come in after. Depending on airline you get to seat the captain chair (Air NZ pilot suggested themselves, Air India pilot had a mortified face when I asked).

But yeah you won’t get a real experience… i always wondered why they don’t put front windows in double decker first class cabin.

Yeah, you'd think they'd have moved to the cloud by now.

Just wait until you find out they run on software, some of it with bugs that they won’t fix.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04...

Why?

Right? Moreover: why is this guy who's never been in it before allowed to go down there and walk around, completely unescorted?

Maintaining and operating the plane are two separate jobs.

The avionics bay is for maintenance, pilots don't get to touch any of it ever.

And pilot training covers the systems not in a physical sense but in a logical "power is supplied to this system via the secondary avionics bus which is fed via this breaker from the generator on the left engine or via another breaker from the main avionics bus" so you can debug and understand what it means when some bus fails or you loose a generator. But we really don't know where the actual wire is or even whether the schematic we learn about different buses is really wired that way or only behaves that way.

Compared to many other planes it's actually quite roomy!

Funny how it reads like he's keeping the reasons secret.

The reasons are bloody obvious, who would want strangers poking around the blinkenlights.

He probably means there is some intrusion prevention mechanism that keeps people out.

He might mean that what happens if you trespass won't be shown! There might be a gas release system that would neutralise an attacker or perhaps just open the door to the hold so they freeze!

Might be that you can't lift that hatch as the server room probably isn't pressurised.

During flight, you can't gain access to the cargo hold.

On the ground, unauthorized personnel gaining access to the cargo hold could leave a bomb there so they really try disallowing that.

I doubt there's special concern here.

I think it’s because anyway there is space under the cockpit and that’s structural. So there is no reason nor incentives to make those machines smaller while sacrificing fixability.

It’s either that or seats or kerosene. There is not enough room for seats, and it’s not an acceptable place to store kerosene (too dangerous in case of crash and can cause stability issues as the volume of kerosene decreases while flying).

Replaceable, modular designs, space for modifications, etc.

Also some sensors are pretty big (laser gyroscopes, for example which are part of ADIRU - air & intertial reference system.

Then you have the central computer clusters which might be separated physically (several computers running in a setup somewhat similar to statically assigned kubernetes) which run all kinds of software from lights management through navigation to brake control.

You also have a bunch of non-computer parts like power distribution units and such, which in a DC might be hidden elsewhere and you wouldn't notice it if you just looked at typical colocation cage.

What would happen when you lose the connection ?

I can’t tell if this is satire or not.

loose connection plane goes down sounds like a good plan :)

The infra is already above the clouds. They only need an upgrade.

The flight servers are technically already in the cloud, when it’s up 35,000 feet in the air.

I think you can see that the shots in the server room were done on the tarmac

Going to guess none of that is in there.

The entertainment electronics are in the headrests so that the kids behind you can regularly hit your headrest for your convenience.

Pretty much all of it is necessary for flight in the era of integrated modular avionics, even the brakes are partially implemented in that room.

Entertainment might have main content distribution server there, as well as gateway between flight systems and entertainment (how you get current flight info and stuff like plane cameras)

Thanks for slipping in that reference to the greatest film ever made.

How would you plug your Macbook into the plane's network?

That was a theory for MH370