Slashdot Mirror
Protecting Cities from Hijacked Planes
Kong99 writes "A group at UC-Berkeley has proposed Soft Walls to stop hijacked planes from entering a protected airspace. Interesting read especially since they claim it is 'hack' proof."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
If I were a pilot, I would certainly not feel safe knowing that the plane will prevent me from entering certain airspace beyond my control. It's all well and good in theory... until the shit hits the fan.
Aside from the obvious risk of software problems (why is the plane trying to veer into that mountain?!) there's also the risk of unpredictable circumstances. What happens if some freaky weather condition needs we need to divert the flight path over a city to evade it etc.? Of course, the answer is to include an 'off' switch but then this defeats the whole point.
Also if it relies on GPS, would it not be possible to just jam the positioning signal from within the plane?
A clever(ish) idea but like a lot of ideas, just too impractical.
Just finished a technothriller (hey, even brain cells need a rest!) by R.J. Pineiro, called "CyberTerror". One of the main plot elements involved hacking the maintenance database at Boeing, such that malware was stealthily distributed with the auto apdate feature of the maintenance computers in the field. The result was a plane which crashed into a city, having completely over-ridden human control. I agree with the article that fly-by-wire technology is a two-edged sword, but ISTM the hack-protection needs to be at a deeper level in the system as well as just in the cockpit.
The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. -- William Gibson
Ding ding ding! Thank you. One need look only as far as the Airbus A-320 that crashed at an airshow while doing a low fly-by; the computer prevented the pilot from increasing power to the engines, and the plane mowed a 200 foot wide swath through the forest and exploded in flames.
Several people were killed,and the pilot was scapegoated by Airbus; they claimed he was flying at 30 feet, not 70- that he had switched off the computer systems, etc. The flight recorder was removed by an AIRBUS EMPLOYEE from the crash scene(there's news footage of him carrying the box away!) and the box disappeared for a day or two. It was then mysteriously returned to the French police...and guess what? There was a large gap in the flight recorder's data, and it showed rather incriminating evidence(for the pilot.)
Please help metamoderate.
The most visible advantage of this is that the pilot cannot 'stall' the airplane. The airplane will not put itself in a situation where it would stop flying.
There was an incident a few years ago at DFW where one plane was on its takeoff roll when another crossed the runway in front of it. It wasn't a fly-by-wire plane, and the pilot of the taking-off plane yanked back the yoke and 'hopped' over the intruding plane. (Slightly more complicated than that, but that's basically what happened; he got enough air to get over the other plane before stalling and landing hard again; he didn't have enough speed to really get airborne.) An Airbus wouldn't have allowed the pilot to make that drastic a control change and would have plowed right into the other airliner no matter what the pilot did.
I heard about this incident from some insiders. I don't know if there's a reference on the web, but if someone else has a link, please provide it. IIRC correctly the intruding aircraft was a Delta plane and the taking off aircraft was a 737, but I'm not sure of that info.
Most crashes are due to pilot error, but I'm not quite ready to hand the controls over to a computer. I think it would be a disaster.