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Electronics & Planes Don't Mix?
dirtydamo writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is running an interesting story on the old debate on whether electronic devices cause problems on planes. It appears pilots are pretty much accustomed to handling weird problems with equipment, which they attribute to passengers' portable devices. More research is needed to determine whether or not this is the actual problem, but the article certainly makes me a little uneasy about modern air travel."
"You've got to ask, do you want to get there, or do you want to use your laptop?"
Both. It's a million dollar aircraft, and the ticket is expensive. Figure out how to make it safe. When they find themselves asking questions like this, how can they wonder why they're having a hard time making money?
I've always wondered why electronic equipment on planes was so much more sensitive then the regular stuff we have down on earth. I mean I can use my mobile phone near my computer and it doesn't lock up and vice versa, turning on my computer doesn't exactly make my mobile phone calls drop out. Electronic devices are specifically designed to withstand a certain amount of interferance, did somebody just forget to do that for plane electronics?
Just a note, airlines make money from people using in-flight phones, it's not in their economic interest to have people using their mobile phones.
Or is this just more of the same: "don't use your cell phone on the plane, use the convinient onboard phones we've installed, or the terrorists win (because it cuts into the bottom line)"?
If you do not fix the problem at the root, you leave yourself open to other, possibly larger, problems.
Let's face it, airplanes generally last 30 years or more before they are retired. Now, I don't put too much stock in a bunch of non-engineer pilots blaming random problems, but if there are problems with these on-board systems and electronic interferance, they need to be fixed, because electronic devices are not going to become less scarce.
We routinely hear stories on the biomedical front about how embedded electrical devices are solving problems that traditional medicine couldn't, or didn't solve well. Since the Jarvis heart, biomedical devices have bee cropping up at an increasing pace. I don't think you can ask the guy with a life-sustaining device embedded in his body to turn it off for the flight.
Add to this wearable computer technology, RFID tags everywhere, smart consumables, etc., and it is very possible that in 30 years it won't be possible to just tell people to turn their devices off. If there is a problem, fix it. If there isn't, stop scaring people.
"No overt attack neccesary; he would flip a switch, sit back and look forward to his 70 virgins that Allah[0] will be handing over in a few minutes while the crew futiley scramble around until the inevitable crash."
If we design our aircraft so poorly as to not have any manual controls, then some re-evaluation needs to occur. There's a reason that we have trained pilots that go through fairly extensive training on a particular aircraft (and are certified on only the particular plan/cockpit configuration that they fly regularly), is because they are supposed to be experts in what they do. If an electronics bug can cause a plane to fall from the sky, then the electronics have way too much control over the flaps, engines, rudder, and ailerons, and even if the computer is capable of making adjustments, the plane should still be manually controllable. I mean, what if lightning strikes a plane in the exact wrong place and it manages to cook the onboard computers?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I have a horrible impression that the use by passengers of high tech equipment is coincident with higher sophistication in the avionics and that software bugs are being misinterpreted by flight crew.
See my journal, I write things there
How could a device like a Spellchecker possibly emit enough RF to interfere with avionics dozens of feet away? If the avionics were really that sensitive then planes would be crashing every time solar activity increases or lighting strikes within miles of the plane.
An airport near here in Roanoke requires a landing approach that takes the plane very close to a couple mountains, the tops of which are literally covered with antenna blasting high power RF across the entire radio spectrum. Yet miraculously that doesn't interfere with the avionics.
Just because the problem went away about the same time the passenger turned off their spellchecker does not prove that was the problem.
What concerns me the most is that these hundreds of problems have been chalked up to consumer devices, when it could be legitimate problems internal to the avionics. If the are simply written off to external causes then the real problems will not be corrected.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
How come passing cell phone towers, HAM, satelites (GPS, etc.), cosmic rays, (... etc. ...) and even the cockpit systems themselves don't cause interference to the cockpit systems?
There's a million sources of radiation anywhere there exists modern inhabitation. How come these immensely powerful sources of radiation do not interfere with the aircraft but my CD player with 2AA batters can? And if a tiny electronic device running on two tiny batteries can disrupt an aircraft, how can it possibly be safe to fly? Doesn't that constitute a violation of FCC regulations? (Yes, I meant FCC.)
Join Tor today!
ay I need more tinfoil on my hat, but I don't doubt for a moment that terrorists somewhere are looking at a way to have a "martyr" on a plane disrupt the controls from the cabin using electronics.
If you want scary, how about a terrorist on a hill top with a satellite dish? You could pump alot more power into a plane from a land based transmitter with a focused beam. You would be near to undetectable. You could fire it off through the back window of a van. You wouldn't even be able to triangulate on the beam if its a focused one. Its alot more discreet than firing a rocket launcher from near the tarmac. Even if you found the "weapon", you would be hard put to prove it caused the accident. Most police wouldn't even know what they were looking at if they found something like this.
This scares me alot more than somebody on a plane with a gameboy that uses 2 AAA batteries.
My 2c worth: Fix the planes - turning off the mobiles just hides the problem. The only defence against this is to harden the plane's electronics so that it can withstand this sort of thing.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
This one always pissed me off, if it's such a danger then WHY TRUST people to be capable of turning off their devices. Most people can't manage their devices anyway, they are NOT IN control of their electronics. Not such a biggie now but later on with fuel cell powered ultra wide band gadgets...