Far from the legends and myths associated with this mysterious place, there is a scientific explanation for past events and advances that make it possible to prevent future events.
It sounds like a story out of The Outer Limits but unfortunately it is absolutely true (or an urban legend for the more sceptical): The Bermuda Triangle existed and was a complete enigma without explanation at first (and for many, for a time) and for much of the 20th century. Consisting of an imaginary equilateral triangle linking the points of the islands of Bermuda and Puerto Rico with Miami, it was the one-million-square-kilometre site of the most significant events of the 20th century. strange phenomena, especially in aeronauticsThe first was in maritime navigation in the 1950s and 1960s.
Among the myths and legends, many of them created by Charles Berlitz, are the appearance of the unmanned HMS Rosalie bound for Havana, or in similar circumstances the Mary Celeste, or the disappearance of 5 US Navy TBM Avenger aircraft, or the disappearance of a Tudor IV Star Tiger with 31 passengers, or a DC-3 NC16002, with 28 passengers and crew.
Many of these stories, invented by Berlitz or embellished by the passing of time, have an explanation that is more simple than enigmaticThe hurricane zone is an area of hurricane formation and confluence of ocean currents, so conditions are often difficult for maritime navigation. But what about air navigation - aren't instruments useful for flying over storms or circumnavigating hurricanes?
And it is at this point that the magnetosphere comes into play, that layer formed by the interaction of the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind. It extends above the ionosphere, above 500 km altitude, protecting life on the surface from the incoming ionising radiation from the Sun, and also from a part of the cosmic rays, and deflecting charged particles towards the magnetic poles, which causes the aurora australis and aurora borealis. Together with the exosphere, it is one of the outermost layers of the atmosphere and one of the most important, since without it, life on Earth would be practically impossible, or would be very different from what we know it to be.
But let's get back to what is important, to our triangle. What does it have to do with the magnetosphere? Well, its link is due to the fact that the magnetosphere, in addition to the Earth's poles as we have mentioned, has other reentrances that, a priori, do not have an easy or unifying explanation in current physics. That is, there are anomalous areas where the solar wind, cosmic radiation and other peculiarities that do not occur anywhere else on the planet (except at the poles), can occur there. And the most famous area is over Brazil, relatively close to the Bermuda Triangle.
In this region, for the year 2020 (it moves slightly from one year to the next), shown in cool colours in the image, radiation levels or ionising events are more likely to be observed at lower altitudes compared to the European, North American or Asian regions. Thus, certain aircraft instruments, such as magnetometers or gyroscopes, especially digital ones, may be affected by excess radiation and give incorrect readings.The aircraft's trajectory may have been disturbed or pilots may have been misled. And hence, a possible explanation for some of the possible cases of missing airliners in these regions where, unfortunately, it was more than likely that their instruments experienced a misbehaviour or misreading, causing a navigational drift that did not take them to the desired airport, or leaving them without fuel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Fortunately, the magnetosphere has already been studied very well and we have maps of their behaviour and movement that tell us how they are allow the prediction of anomalous areas and the design of instruments that withstand the expected radiation levels.. Thus, in any type of current aircraft, we always find redundant systems, and if they are particularly critical, triple redundancy. For example, magnetometers or, more generally, the inertial measurement units of any commercial aircraft are always based on two or more independent navigation systems which, for each reading, rely on data from two or more sensors. In this way, the use of a Pitot tube for airspeed readings would not constitute any risk, since it can also be measured in another Pitot tube, or by GPS, or by integration of the accelerations experienced (for example).
Similarly, the cosmic radiation causing changes in the bits stored in registers and memories of the different microcontrollers, microprocessors and digital systems of the aircraft are redundant, diversified or hardened by hardware, by software, or by a combination of all of them. Thus, a single register or memory can be:
- Spatially tripled in three different memory chips or sectors (memory redundancy) hardware).
- Triple cloning on three different memory maps on the same chip (redundancy of the memory maps) software).
- Duplicated in two memories of different technology, such as EEPROM and Flash, for example (diversification of hardware).
- Duplicate data in two different formats or with two different encodings, such as Little endian y Big endian (software diversification).
- Storage in a memory specially designed for cosmic ray sensitive applications (hardware hardening).
- Stored with a continuous error detection and correction algorithm, such as ECC (software hardening).
- A combination of any of the above techniques.
Of course, technology and especially aeronautics, learns from its mistakes and from other sectors to make ever more robust teams.The various techniques for making instrument readings available in the aeronautical world, even under the worst possible circumstances, provide this sector with a high level of reliability and reliability. In particular, the various techniques for providing instrument readings in the aeronautical world, even under the worst possible circumstances, provide this sector with a security guarantee and a guarantee of support. And that's why anomalies or adverse conditions are no longer an impediment to getting you safely to your destination.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in the text are those of the author alone and not necessarily those of the author's employer.
