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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."
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...
/. 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...
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
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.
If I want to cause panic on a commercial aircraft, I no longer need to bring a bomb?
"Stand back! I have a bluetooth device!"
Okay, let me get this straight...
- FCC approves UWB devices for testing at power levels an order of magnitude less than is commonly believed to cause ANY interference,
- UWB devices have been tested, and found to interfere with the #1 topic guaranteed to scare large populations?
What device did they test? Where'd they get these things? How can I know they didn't just hook up a 30KV spark-gap transmitter and go "See??? Interference!" (Booga booga booga!!)AND
Oh, great. "UWB will cause a 747 to crash into the White House, curdle your milk, kidnap your virgin daughter and sell her to the Hells Angels, molest your wife, and defraud every company you've ever invested in!"
Great, sure. The airline industry (like any industry) hates to spend money unless it's absolutely necessary. Look at the current state of US air traffic control. (Yike!) Heck, look up the state of aviation radios, even! There's a simple little thing called "heterodyne detection" that isn't present! (People have died as a result!) Yes, there are fancy computers, and GPS, and "glass cockpits" -- but there are some extremely basic technologies of aviation that haven't changed in 50 years simply because nobody has said "That's dangerous and idiotic, we've had better tech for a generation! Do it right!!!"
On second thought... this is probably a good thing. It'll return air travel to its' proper place -- an enforced, several-hour vacation! Relax, look out the window, marvel at the world you live in. No phones, no computers, but lots of distractions. God forbid, you might even talk to your neighbor. (I wonder how many people even remember how to work with a pen and a piece of paper..?)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
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.
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
I mean, really, what this is really about is the airlines losing the 5-10 bucks they charge for those headphones so you can watch those sorry ass movies on crappy VHS.
What they really want to ban is DVD players!
This
(Business travelers are apparently the highest margin passenger class becuase they tend to book nicer seats and fly on shorter notices so they're higher up the essentially exponentail cost function correlating time-to-flight-from-ticket-booking and ticket price.)
The reason business travellers are willing to pay for better seats is that they have the room to work on board the plane! There are other advantages too (fully flexible ticket, greater cabin allowance so you don't have to check luggage and can avoid reclaim queues, etc) but really, what matters is being able to work on board. You can get an awful lot done with no distractions between London and San Francisco, especially if you can time the flight to coincide with a working day - that's one of the reasons that companies foot the bill for business class. Work that you can do on board these days pretty much demands a computer. Ban laptops and two things will happen: business people who really need to be there will be sent coach, and everyone else will invest in videoconferencing.
The one airline that's smart enough to train its cabin crew in what is acceptable or not is going to own the market.
Not that I care though. If it's good for safety it's beyond question.
What's "good for safety" is the plane never taking off. There is always a compromise between expediency and safety.
And honestly, if you don't have your work done by the time you catch the plane to your distant meeting, the chances of you being ready are slim-to-none anyway
That's not true either. Ever done business travel? It's common to get a template done at the office, get the very latest figures as assumptions that morning, and work them into your document on the plane. If it's just a transatlantic flight, you'll probably have to deliver that document or presentation as soon as you can get to the client's office from the airport.
This method could be first field-tested by a volunteer group of female flight stewards.
...but I'm still a bit amazed at how lightly people take issues like this.
Your sitting in a metal crate with two giant combustion engines delivering an insane amount of power to get you off ground.
A plane consists of several thousand electronic, mechanical, and electromechanical systems, a zillion bolts and hundreds of tonnes of lightweight metal. And any single part of this giant system might fail at any time.
The fact that accidents don't happen more often than they actually do must be considered an engineering miracle.
So, you can't smoke and sip a gin&tonic while writing some shitty design document nobody cares about and which you might as well write when you get there?
Boo-fucking-hooo
Read a book.
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....
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
If this were really an issue, we would be seeing terrorists with small devices built into cell phone cases that were built using a switch, a battery, a capacitor, a coil, an electromechanical relay, and a large antenna loop: a spark gap generator, of the type one makes from Radio Shack project kits.
;^)).
Or, they would just have cell phones, since they are also supposedly a source of interference with something other than AirFone revenues
In reality, this article is _mostly_ bogus.
The ILS (Instrument Landing System) is vulnerable to electronic interference, mostly because it is an incredibly ancient implementation, and has not yet been replaced with anything designed in the last two decades.
The antique ILS in even the most modern aircraft is why you can't use electronic equipment during takeoff and landing (landing is obvious; so's takeoff, if you realize that it might have to be aborted, in which case it turns into a landing).
Most airports, however, are in urban areas, with a high telephone cell density. If this were ever a real issue, we would see aircraft dropping out of the sky as they flew over any urban area. SFO, PHX, and SLC tend to have a higher than average instrument requirement (the first for fog, the second two for temperature inversion based wind shear; want to vomit? Fly Tucson to Phoneix. SLC also has snow visibility issues in winter). For most airports, the systems are largely ignored. SLC has an upgraded system that ~60% of modern planes can use, actually; it's a deployment issue.
The TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) is actually based on paired receivers. It's succeptable to powerful broad-band interferences; "powerful", in this case, means "orders of magnitude higher than the those currently permitted for use in UWB devices".
The failure you would see (and you would probably need a specially manufactured transmitter to see it) would be a 180 degree polar flip (i.e. if the transponder you cared about were 23 degrees down and 17 degrees right, it would read as 157 degrees up and 163 degrees left). This actually happens a lot, and the hardware is built to automatically compensate through multiple samples (i.e. sustained interference is required).
The fix for this is to go to trios instead of pairs of receivers.
As we saw just the other week, though, TCAS itself is generally ignored in favor of ground instructions, we lost two planes in a collision in Germany specifically because TCAS was ignored.
Given that TCAS is almost never used, anyway, because the controllers keep the planes far enough apart, the interference is isn't likely to be an issue.
In any case, I think the overall concern is a result of the fear of out-of-spec devices, which met emissions at the time of manufacture, and have since, for whatever reason, ended if with a much higher signal strength.
Personally, I think they are worried over nothing: it's just an uncommenly slow news day, what with most of the U.S. shut down for Labor Day...
-- Terry
For shrugging off a command to open up and take everyting out of his wallet. He did it but his verbal response was "Yeah you got me I keep a rifle in there."
It was on MSNBC I think. Coupled with airlines now charging up to $80 per bag to check the bag if it's over an arbitrary size and basically what you have is an industry that is committed to committing suicide. At this rate there will be 1 or 2 Long Distance Airlines that only carry passengers overseas or long distances from coast to coast or internationally outside of western Europe. And everyone else will do anything but fly, which will costs thousands of dollars anyway.
It will be a return to the 1930's except we don't have trains in the US anymore so everyone will drive in Federally mandated 8 MPG land arks - one to an SUV by law. Once in a great while we'll look up and see a jet and it will seem as strange as seeing a hot air balloon or the Concorde today.
Damn right!
A year or two ago, I went to a lecture from an expert in radio interference from DERA (UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency - the guys who write the UK's rules on this stuff) and he showed us a graph of the requirements for noise immunity (as in, if your plane's electronics can't take this level of noise at this frequency, it's grounded). Then he showed us the maximumoutput of a cellphone. In short: find me a plane which is genuinely affected by use of a phone inside, and I'll show you a plane which won't be leaving the ground any time soon...
Not to mention, as others have pointed out, any aircraft system that vulnerable to interference is just begging to be knocked down by terrorists - forget planting a bomb, just get a little battery-powered RF transmitter on! A slightly modified electric shaver would probably do just fine...
There is a genuine reason not to use cellphones in aircraft, though: cellphone networks are carefully designed to avoid frequency conflicts between towers with the phone being at ground level. Put a phone at 30,000 feet, and it "sees" multiple cells on each frequency - which apparently can upset the phone network.
Of course, the airlines don't like you using phones (other than their $5/min "skyphones", of course) or anything else interactive, because it stops you buying expensive drinks (on domestic flights), duty free (on international flights) etc. How "convenient" that United just found a "safety" reason to stop you doing anything that doesn't involve paying them more money, huh?
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."
- "...the fact that the U.S. ATC relies on "dated" technology may be the reason it's so successful."
Oh God, thank you. I needed a laugh! "US ATC" and "reliable" in the same sentence, with a straight face even!To the regular person, I suppose ATC could be looked at as 'reliable' -- but go talk to a controller sometime; the people who have to present the aura of reliability when something fails. Ask him (or her) how often their radio breaks. Or how hard it is to get vacuum tubes for some of their equipment. Perhaps you could visit the vampires -- the people who sit in an almost completely dark room dealing with everything IFR (and VFR in controlled airspace). Everything is voice and paper -- it's a sobering sight. Yes, there is a lot of computerization, but the interaction goes
- Pilot (flight plan) -> computer -> piece of paper -> controller <-> pilot!
It's a wonder these people stay sane sometimes.(Note the heads on the arrows.)
Canada privatized their ATC system, and (to an outsider) it has worked quite well. Communications systems are much better. The controllers don't have to keep track of planes on slips of paper, they can actually interact with the computer. One has to consider, however, that Canada doesn't deal with nearly the same daily volume of aircraft that the United States does, so their successes may not scale the way we'd need.
I must admit that the last time I was in an ATC facility was before the whole Y2K thing, and a lot of money was spent to upgrade things for that particular scare. Perhaps things are better now, but ATC doesn't live on internet time -- so I doubt it.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Or is there some reason for putting radio navigation receiving equipment in the passenger cabin?