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

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....