US air safety bods call it 'potentially catastrophic' if reboot directive not implemented //

The US Federal Aviation Administration has ordered Boeing 787 operators to switch their aircraft off and on every 51 days to prevent what it called "several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios" – including the crashing of onboard network switches.

The airworthiness directive, due to be enforced from later this month, orders airlines to power-cycle their B787s before the aircraft reaches the specified days of continuous power-on operation.

The power cycling is needed to prevent stale data from populating the aircraft's systems, a problem that has occurred on different 787 systems in the past. //

A previous software bug forced airlines to power down their 787s every 248 days for fear electrical generators could shut down in flight.

Airbus suffers from similar issues with its A350, with a relatively recent but since-patched bug forcing power cycles every 149 hours.