The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a warning about Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, saying that a software glitch in the jets’ systems could suddenly shut all electrical power to the plane mid-flight, causing pilots to lose control. The directive was issued after FAA’s testing revealed that Boeing 787s could lose all AC electrical power and revert to failsafe mode, after being continuously powered for 248 days. The failsafe mode could make all four generators aboard the 787 go offline. Such an incident happening mid-air could possibly mean a gigantic catastrophe because without power the pilot could lose control of the 787s. The FAA directive says, The i-Programmer explains the Integer Overflow bug as below So the only workable solution, till the patch to address the bug, to keep the Boeing 787s afloat without any accident is to reboot the Dreamliners every 248 days. Your options are to increase the number of bits used, which puts off the overflow, or you could work with infinite precision arithmetic, which would slowly use up the available memory and finally bring the system down.”
