I was reading a very interesting presentation and technical article by LANL and Honeywell on "Thermal Neutrons in Airplanes"¹ which I remembered downloading a while back.

The reason was the recent incident with turbulence and I remembered that there had been an issue with SEE ("Single Event Effects") on a Quantas flight causing it to lose altitude abruptly.

The original reason for downloading it was somewhat historical - SEEs had been plaguing our first three DEC Alpha machines at Imperial College (1993…) over weekends or, rather, the machines were inexplicably crashing with a machine check error over the weekend, and only over the weekend. At the time it turned out that a particular experiment in the Physics department next door to us (Mathematics, proper stuff ;P) ran over weekends and "might produce some stray neutrons." We did not deploy tinfoil (hats or otherwise) but there was an "environmental change" to the experimental setup²

The bottom line is that if you have neutrons hitting your chips it is Not Good™

Now, in avionics and, in particular on the poor Quantas 72 flight, this had rather dire consequences³ but this can be expanded to other systems.

In a previous life I was loosely associated with the Centre for Software Reliability at City University and got a bit of a hammering on the subject matter of dependable computing (actually, this should be hammered in the heads of so many people we'd cause a hammer shortage world-wide) and this is still something very close to my heart: in everything I design I always try to include "fail safe" and "dependable" as parameters.

Now, as more and more data is moved into the cloud and with it the associated processing I think we have an interesting problem coming up.

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¹ "TINMAN Thermal Neutron Detector for Aircraft", 2021 - https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1783494 - !!rabbit hole alert!!
² a particularly contrived combination of British understatement and burocratese.
³ see "Ghosts in the code: the near crash of Quantas flight 72" - https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/ghosts-in-the-code-the-near-crash-of-qantas-flight-72-b4faebc90e27 (Medium, sorry)