Britain's CAA Considers Laptop Ban on Commercial Aircraft

hayb writes "An article in Britain's The Register claims that NASA and United Airlines have conducted tests on various aircraft and have found that ultra-wideband (UWB) devices "knocked out" collision-avoidance systems and impaired instrument landing systems. It states that the blanket ban on all devices in necessary because flight crews do not have the knowledge to differentiate between standard notebooks and ones with UWB devices."

Comments

Eeek

[LBU.Zorro]

Does anyone else think that it should therefore be possible to create a small handheld device that say looks like a walkman/personal stereo, but contains an UWB transmitter? Activate it in a heavily traveled airspace and create chaos at best...

Rather than just try and ban the devices shouldn't they be working on methods of blocking the signals? Or altering the collision avoidance systems to cope with the interferrance?? Doesn't this smack of really bad shortsightedness?? Even if UWB is several years away, spark-gap transmitters ought to be homebuildable and with far more power than the average UWB transmitter.

I might be giving away ideas here, but doubt that terrorists read /. and that they couldn't have thought of it themselves :) In fact why bother being on the plane, have it in the baggage hold on a timer... It's not explosives, its a harmless walkman...

Just a thought, these things crop up when people try one solution to a problem, but they are just trying to prevent it. And even though people say prevention is better than cure, cure is far more reliable.

Z.

P.S. Sorry to bring the 'terrorist' angle up again but this strikes me as a stupid thing to do, even if it never occurs. When you have people's lives at risk it ought to be cure, not a reliance on prevention.

Re:heh, way to go

[mikeplokta]

Not that I care though. If it's good for safety it's beyond question.

It's certainly not beyond question just because it's good for safety. Safety at any price is a bad idea. If it costs $1 billion per life saved, you can save a lot more lives by spending the same money on preventive health care.

Stability And Security

[Effugas]

Once again, the equivalence of instability with insecurity rears its ugly head.

What we appear to have is a claim that airplane electronics are extraordinarily open to interference from consumer devices. They are so open, that such devices may indeed accidentally trigger safety-critical failures in the operating environment.

Lets assume this is true.

Now understand, that which can be accidental does not need to be.

If one can accidentally down a plane with a gameboy, it stands to reason that one may be able to intentionally down the plane with the very same gameboy -- easier, in fact, because the attacker knows exactly which frequencies to exploit. This is...disturbing. I cannot imagine it very difficult to stow any form of consumer electronics, even with a "time delay" activation, inside of luggage or carryon.

Now, I'm not afraid of gameboys. See, I've *met* Boeing safety engineers. Hell, I've quoted em, learned a bit from em. Paranoid doesn't begin to describe them. These guys imagine everything, and implying that they didn't budget for even a miniscule amount of shielding and noise resistance...it's almost insulting.

Hell, you don't see planes crash every time the sun decides to belch out a few terajoules of flare in our direction. Not to mention the basic design of a fuselage bears some resemblance to an EM-blocking faraday cage.

Granted, it may very well be this same paranoia that allows those same engineers to say "Please, no new equipment, we couldn't test with that precise radio environment". The *world* is an unpredictable precise radio environment, and unfortunately, so now are its residents. I hate to say it, but if a plane can't survive a ringing cell phone, it ain't Nokia who's to blame.

That being said, the UWB failure are interesting: If the claim is that UWB operates below the noise floor relative to a given frequency, then the question becomes how did the collision avoidance systems even *detect* UWB transmissions, unless they themselves operate in a baseband manner?

One answer is that noise floors might be relative: A nearby transmitter emitting weakly across all frequencies might be overpowering the far away signal tranmitting on one. This is...hard to believe, but not impossible.

I suppose that's my biggest problem with the consumer electronics ban: Since it's inconceivable that planes are actually vulnerable to random noise from consumer electronics, *all* device-level concerns become suspect. That's annoying.

If somebody -- anybody -- has evidence they feel I should see, feel free to contact me here or in email.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Re:Stability And Security

[Shirotae]

Now understand, that which can be accidental does not need to be.

One factor that we must remember is that permission to use a device applies to all the passengers, but malicious intent is rare. It may well be the case that one or a few devices can be tolerated, but dozens or hundreds cause a problem. For example, the one cellphone activated by a terrorist may not do much harm, but when every passenger calls to say "we are just landing", that may be more of a problem.

One passenger using one device may not do much harm, just as killing one whale, using one CFC aerosol, cutting down one tree etc. does not do much harm. If we want to be sure that the devices are safe, we have to think in terms of every passenger being wired up like a christmas tree with every combination of devices. It may be beyond the average, but I would not want to be crew on a flight taking people to the UberGeek Convention if there is no restriction on passengers' use of electronic and radiating devices.

Using the same logic:

[BigBir3d]

All people are now banned from flights, as the security crews are not able to tell the difference between terrorists and regular passengers.

This is how the slide starts....

This is why the old air traffic control works

[thogard]

ATC on many parts of the US and world is based on allocation of large amounts of air space for fixed times just like the old railroad lines. Its designed so that radio failure isn't a problem. Now that a generation of programmers have read Booch's book on OOD and know how to do air trafic control better than the old system we get all these new systems that work as long as all the gear works.

Old the system made use of paper strips that track the planes. The cool thing about the paper system is that when the power goes out or the scope reboots or whatever, the controller has a bunch of paper strips to look at and know whats going on. All the controller needs is a radio and they can get all the planes down.

Australia has a "modern" ATC system and I've got to talk to three different people to groups to fly into the general aviation airoport in Melbourne if I come from the north. In the US, that would be two. The controllers here out number the ones in the US and can't cope with a much lighter load. The new system for London has had major issues since it was turned on.

General rules for programming have been discovered. Most of them have been used in the Kansas City freight yards for a long time.--Derrick Lehmer (1949) from Knuth Vol1

Re:I'm not scared of flying..

[JimPooley]

What he said.

Even small training aircraft such as the one I'm learning to fly in have redundancy of vital systems - two fuel pumps, two ignition systems, two radios.

Aviation is very conservative. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" appears to be the motto. Any new development has to be proven to be just as safe as what is currently in use and fully ratified by the aviation authority of the country in question, i.e. the CAA in the UK, the FAA in the USA. So a new development in avionics can take years to come into practical use.

That said, the technology is filtering down, so now you're finding light aircraft with glass cockpits (i.e. LCD instrument panels instead of dials), sidesticks, TCAS, HUDs etc.

Solve the real problem...

[slykens]

Why aren't avionics systems properly shielded to begin with? Sure, most of the designs are at least twenty years old, but that's not an excuse to not be protected from even the chance that some sort of RF or EMP attack is possible.

There's a story of how the US managed to capture a Soviet MIG sometime during the 70's (I think). They took it apart and found that the Soviets were still using vacuum tubes. The problem was not that the Soviets couldn't use microchips. They chose vacuum tubes to protect against EMP and to not have the added weight of shielding. I am not suggesting we retrofit modern airlines with vacuum tubes, what I am suggesting is that the dangers of RF and EMP attacks be properly accounted for, and if they currently are then to drop the bunk about "interference with navigation and communications systems."

Faraday Cage?

[Omega]

This may seem a little naive, but why not just enclose the passenger cabin in a Faraday cage? Something like chicken wire should do fine. It could easily be concealed behind the wallpaper, carpet and overhead bins. Admittedly you'd have to do something about the windows, but this could easily seal-in most EM signals which harm airplane navigation systems (including cell phones).

Or is there some reason for putting radio navigation receiving equipment in the passenger cabin?