Originally Posted by weido salt
What I find disturbing is I have heard from informed sources, this.
"If the computers are knocked out by e.g., a voltage surge or spike, the crew are unable to control the aircraft."
Your "informed sources" are not very well informed.
It would be interesting to learn the content of the stream of maintenance messages. Were the failing systems in close proximity to each other? The space shuttle that disintegrated on re-entry registered a series of proximate failures before the catastrophic break up. Could the maintenance messages be indicative of a spreading fire in the avionics taking down systems one by one?