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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!"
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
...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....
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