Conversations With ChatGPT: Flight Ceiling of Aircraft

Created with Grok.

You said: 

“Hello.”

ChatGPT said:

Hey there! How’s it going? What’s on your mind today?

You said:

“Would it be possible for more advanced passenger aircraft to fly at higher altitudes? I know there would be less oxygen, so there would be an issue with engines running efficiently, but there would be less drag also.”

Airbus A320 Incident, Air Travel and Cosmic Radiation

Image created by Grok

Airlines worldwide have grounded their Airbus A320 fleets to carry out urgent software updates following an incident in October, when a JetBlue aircraft on a flight between the US and Mexico suddenly lost altitude after a pitch-down event, without any pilot input. According to a BBC report, "Around 6,000 A320 planes were thought to be affected," but many were able to fly again within hours after undergoing the software update. It's thought that the glitch on the JetBlue aircraft was caused by corruption of data in flight avionics computers, responsible for calculating elevation. A press release by Airbus on 28th November mentions "intense solar radiation" as being the possible cause of the recent event.

Cosmic radiation, consisting of high energy particles, mostly originates from the Sun, but also from the remnants of supernovae in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and other distant galaxies. It's more intense at higher altitudes where the thinner atmosphere has less of a shielding effect. The Earth's magnetic field also protects us from cosmic radiation, by steering particles safely into the poles, generating the spectacular phenomenon of the Northern and Southern Lights in the process. Cosmic rays can affect electronics, and there have been cases of glitches in satellites. According to a Scientific American article, "Extensive background radiation studies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically experience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month."

This article from the EPA provides some further information on cosmic radiation and outlines its effects on passengers and crew on aircraft. 

Some Aircraft Have Rats

Ram air turbine on Airbus A320. Image courtesy Curimedia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ram air turbines that is, or RATs. If main power is lost, the small windmill-like turbine is lowered from the belly of the fuselage and uses ram pressure or force of the moving air to drive an electrical generator or hydraulic pump. This is a last resort scenario though. Usually an aircraft's engines generate electrical power as well as thrust for propulsion. If they fail, an auxiliary power unit (APU) provides power for electrical systems. This also provides system power before the main engines start up, when an aircraft is on the runway. An APU is a mini jet engine, usually mounted in the tail of the aircraft, independent of the main engines and not involved in propulsion.

References:

Naidu, A. (2024, December 29). Redundancy approaches to flight safety: The curious case of the b737’s absence of a ram air turbine compared to the A320". LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/redundancy-approaches-flight-safety-curious-case-b737s-andrew-naidu

Lomas, C. (2024, March 11). What is the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU)?. Flightradar24 Blog. https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/auxiliary-power-unit/

Flight Engineers

Concorde flight deck. Image courtesy James E. Petts, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Once upon a time, aircraft had flight engineers or "flight mechanics" as well as pilots. Their job was to look after the aircraft's complex flight systems such as engines, electrics and hydraulics, avionics and fuel delivery systems. The function of the flight engineer has mostly been replaced by complex computer automation systems.
Concorde was a supersonic airliner, but its technology dated from the late 60s and was never updated like that in more modern aircraft such as the 737 (flown by Ryanair and many airlines worldwide). There have been four generations and several variants within each generation of the 737 since the original 737-100 made its maiden flight in 1967.
In this article from CNN, Concorde flight engineer Warren Hazelby talks with journalist Francesca Street about his career.

Flight Controls

Image attribution: Piotr Jaworski, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 

A nice little animated GIF from Wikipedia showing how the flight controls in an aircraft work. The rudder pedals and control column (also known as the control stick, control yoke or control wheel) or joystick on more modern aircraft, move the control surfaces to make the aircraft roll, pitch or yaw.

A): aileron, B): control stick, C): elevator, D): rudder.

On early aircraft, the linkages would have been steel cables like bicycle brake cables or car handbrake cables, and control surfaces would have been moved directly using only human power from the flight controls. This system is still used on some light aircraft. As aircraft became larger, it would have been infeasible to move heavy control surfaces by hand simply because of their weight and aerodynamic forces on the surfaces (like when you try to control an umbrella in high winds) so hydraulics was used to move the surfaces (similar to the way a digger works.) Nowadays, most aircraft are fly-by-wire, meaning when the pilot moves the stick, a control signal is sent to either electrical or hydraulic actuators that move the control surfaces. The Airbus A320 was the first commercial aircraft to use this system in 1987 although fighter aircraft previously used a version of the technology. Fly-by-optics is another development, allowing higher data transfer rates and immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI).

There's a discussion about fly-by-wire on Aviation StackExchange here:

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/21679/airbus-is-to-fly-by-wire-as-boeing-is-to