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Wireless Devices Could Foil Hijack Attempts
ErikPeterson writes Flight attendants soon may be outfitted with wireless devices that would be used to alert pilots of attempted hijackings or other in-air security threats.
The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday that it plans to require that airlines provide a way for the cabin crew to "discreetly notify" pilots "in the event of suspicious activity or security breaches in the cabin."
The proposed regulation, which is not yet final, grew out of an advisory panel that the Transportation Department created after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. That panel recommended that cabin crew have "a method for immediate notification to the flight deck during a suspected threat in the cabin" that would permit pilots to take appropriate action, such as beginning an immediate landing."
How long until someone hacks these devices and starts sending false alarms? Terrorists wouldn't have to actually hijack planes anymore! Just stuff the devices in someone's baggage with a timer on them. They're non-explosive, so they wouldn't be sniffed out, and I'm sure they could disguise them. All you need is a power source and the transmitter. Think of how easy it would be to freeze airlines. I hope they really make an effort to make sure that these things are secure.
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Yes, because in highly stressful situations you will be able to "subtly keying the (intercom) in a specific manner" as mentioned in the article. It amazes me sometimes that engineers and techheads don't factor in humans under stress.
It's not just blocking them. You'd have to count on the crew actually being able to set off the alarm. Think of banks: they started putting buttons under the counter or in a discreet location. Now a holdup person comes in and the first thing they want is everyone's hands in the air.
I'm trying to imagine a device a crew memember could activate without it being seen. Once word gets out that they press a button on a wrist band, or something else, hijackers will know what action to watch for and what device to remove from the staff.
Maybe they'd be better off with something like the health monitors I saw on the Tour de France. They're wireless and transmit things like heart rate to a monitor. The pilot would have to evaluate the info. If he sees one crew member with a sudden heart rate increase, he can check on that person, but if it happens to two or more at once, that would be a strong indication that something stressful is happening in the plane.
Being able to go up and talk to the pilots as a kid? and they gave you those little wings. that was so cool when i was like 8. too bad my kids probably wont be able to do anything like that.
Once the pilot knows something fishy is going on in the cabin, why couldn't they release anesthetsine gas like they do in every Star Trek episode when the Enterprise gets hijacked?
On an unrelated note, this new redesign of slashdot has guilted me into closing my p tags in submissions.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
An AC posted the following in a thread on the recent Thoughts on the Space Elevator story:
A few seconds of warning would be enough to hit a Lockout button. There wouldn't be anything like enough time to land a plane or even change its position enough to bother a hijacker (terrorist or mere jet thief).
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Wireless notification device? You mean like the hi-jacking transponders the 9/11 terrorists turned off after hijacking the plane? I never knew there was such a thing until I read the 9/11 commission report. I guess it was somewhat of a secret to allow pilots to subtly notify controllers of a hijacking until the hijackers found out. My point is that once this little "secret" is out, how are we going to stop hijackers from disabling it as well? Would it be something wore under the cloth? It should be easy to activate so that activation can be disguised. But if it is easy to activate, what's to stop someone from accidentally activating it? I guess it's better than the conspicuous[sp?] intercom system.
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if it were a wristband i would press it anyway if a hijacker told me to put my hands up. i would take the risk to save people on the ground. odds are the hijackers dont have a gun or anything else too dangerous. besides that, i really dont think a plane is going to be successfully hijacked for a looooooooong time. flight 93 is evidence for that.
always mosh clockwise
How many hijackings have there been since 9/11? My naive expectation is that hijackers would now have a short life expectancy, no matter how they're armed.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm usually not one to pooh-pooh any constructive idea, but the "sleeping gas" one always gets me.
Scenario:
- mother holding infant
- sleeping gas goes off
- mother drops infant (it would have to be fast acting to be effective against hijackings no?)
- infant breaks neck
- hijacker just turns out to be a drunken salesman from Hoboken on his way back from a weekend in Vegas
Passengers kick terrorist ass. That's the most reliable way to stop a terrorist on a plane. Remember Richard Reid?
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Personally, I've always been fond of Archie Bunker's idea of how to deal with hijackers: arm all the passengers so the hijackers know they're ournumbered.
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One good scream, and the flight deck will have been immediately notified of a problem of some kind in the cabin. Low tech. But pervasive. All the flight attendents already have the necessary hardware. Batteries won't run out.
No door between cabin and cockpit!
Wow, no more problems. Hijackers can do what ever they want in the back but they can't get to the pilots.
For current planes, retrofit with impenetrable doors that can not be opened after take of. Even by the pilots.
Now with out control of the plane there is no reason to hijack and the skies are safe!
Remember KISS
Keep it simple stupid.
When the Russians tried this in Moscow back in '03 they killed well over 100 hostages with the gas.
Good idea in theory, bad idea in practice.
Great now hijackers just need to crack this device and they can take over the plane remotely
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On the other hand, in a case like 9/11, you restrict their movement, keep them away from the passangers with their hands up, until you no longer need them. Then you either kill them or severe their hands.
Making it hard to get away from someone is just a sure way to make sure it's either cut off or the person is killed.
The problem is that most details should not be published, but will be found out anyway. If you've got a highly organized group, you set up a fake hi-jacking. The perps watch what happens to be sure they know what the signal is. Then they communicate this info through their lawyers to their partners.
Why not just put in video cameras?
So the pilot doesn't have to watch the passengers getting killed while he refuses to open the cockpit door?
It seems like we're dealing with terrorism in EXACTLY the same way Microsoft deals with computer security. To wit: we patch and patch and patch the exploited breaches while ignoring likely targets simply because they haven't been exploited yet.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
If a terrorist wants to blow up the plane, he'll smuggle on a metal-free fuse-detonated bomb (like the shoe bomber) and he'll blow it up from the toilet (unlike the rather foolish shoe bomber.) This device doesn't matter at all if all the terrorist is trying to do is take down the plane. Indeed, nothing short of mandatory strip searches can stop this sort of attack.
As for hijackings, you don't need to worry about it because IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. I can't believe people still think that terrorists will try again to hijack a commercial airliner and use it as a missile--it was a one-time trick and it will NEVER work again. If you want proof of this, you need look no farther than United Airlines Flight 93. ONE HOUR after the first plane hit the trade center, the passengers of the Pennsylvania flight decided not to let the terrorists keep control of the plane. Despite the fact that the terrorists had already taken control in the cockpit and should have had a significant tactical advantage, the passengers were able to overwhelm them and force them to abort the mission. Had the passengers acted earlier, they would have never even made it to the cockpit. A few passengers may have died, but NO ONE can stand against dozens or hundreds of passengers stampeding them in close quarters.
Our mindset has changed now, and not a single person in the USA, from a seven year old boy to a ninety year old grandmother, is stupid or cowardly enough to let someone hijack the plane. This device is pointless, because no potential hijacker will ever made it to the cockpit ever again.
But, back to the point. Doesn't anybody remember the Moscow Theatre hostage crisis, when the Russian government ended up killing 120-odd hostages with their "sleeping gas"? And, guess who would be most likely to die? You guessed it - children and babies. It's likely in your scenario that that baby would die before its neck started to bend. There's reports that the US government is quietly working on less lethal varieties of knockout gas, but I'd be surprised if they managed to develop something that was effective and safe over a broad enough dosage range to be deployable.
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I've never understood how planes can be hijacked in the first place without explosives - they have a 100+ people in a small, cramped space, making firearms pretty useless, and the passengers know that they will propably be killed anyway if the plane falls or hits something, so why not just storm the hijacker - or just throw him with bags or something ? It just doesn't add up...
Because hijacked planes did not hit anything until 9-11. Mostly, the hijackers wanted to achieve some other goal, either getting somewhere, having someone released from some prison, or just plain money. They wanted to survive as well, and for this, they had to land the plane somewhere (where they were vulnerable to intervention by special forces). Killing everyone in the plane (and others on the ground) has not always been the aim of airplane hijackings.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
As I understand it, all Israeli El Al planes have a separate external entrance for the pilots, and the cockpit is not accessible from the cabin. Why would you need access to the cockpit from the cabin, or vice versa, during the flight anyway?
Nothing worse than now, as long as the system is such that the trusted pilot must enable ground control from the plane:
Ground control taken over, plane not taken over: no problem, trusted pilot flies.
Ground control not taken over, plane taken over: no problem, ground control flies plane (provided trusted pilot had enough time to transfer control).
Ground control taken over, plane taken over: terrorists win, but that's also the case now. So the new system add security without introducing new weaknesses (except those introduced by added complexity).
I have a better, more proven technology that will foil hijack attempts.
A lock.
This simple mechanical mechanism will permanently seal the door between the cockpit and the passenger compartments, thus preventing all access to the pilots while the plane is in transit. Best of all, it has thousands of years of successful field application behind it!
Alternatively, build a seperate, external door to access the cockpit and replace the internal door with a solid wall. You can push the wall back a bit and create a little suite in there so they have food and facilities during long flights. Problem solved!
=Smidge=
Flown much recently? As a result of 9-11. cockpit doors are locked in flight, and have been for a few years. At the same time, existing doors were replaced by sturdy metal doors to prevent someone from simply chopping their way through to the crew.
Your notion of adding a second external door would require redesign and refit of every aircraft, which is unlikely ffor financial and aerodynamic reasons. Also, the crew needs access to the passenger section, especially during non-hijacking emergencies..
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As soon as I saw the topic I just knew there would be two types of reply.
First was the people who think they are funny. That crew was very sad. Most of the funnies came from crew 2.
Crew 2 was made up of those who posted those really serious solutions that had never been thought through before the spur of the moment hit the poster.
As a pilot I have given this a bit of thought in the past and I don't think that I have a perfect answer but I'd start with:
1> Seal the cockpit. Door locked from inside. Toilet facilities inside and meals etc pre-loaded. Microwave and hot water in cockpit micro-galley.
2> No communication between cabin and cockpit except for a set of signals that do something like indicate that we have a medical emergency back here that requires landing at nearest airport. Maybe one or two more. NO SECRET combos permitted.
That's about it. The more complex the more chance of fuckups.
If you can't get to the cockpit you can't take over the flight no matter which cornflake packet your licence came in.
If you can't talk to (or signal) the flight crew you can't use a hostage to force them to do anything.
I'm sure I haven't covered anything. I didn't have a plan prepared for the scenario posited here. On the other hand I've seen innumerable posts here that I'd hate to have applied to ANY flight that I was on.
The people who wrote them would have done better to commit their ideas to paper and re-read them with friends before thinking they'd had a eureka moment with no prep time.
Otherwise it is moot point to lock the cockpit door. The terrorist will start to behead the hostages one-by-one until you let them into the cockpit.
I highly doubt this would work as numerous flights have had incidents where a would be attacker or miscreant was subdued, and by subdued I mean beat the fuck out of, while attempting to do some craziness. I would categorize a beheading as one of those mob triggereing events.
Please.. the same shit that happened on the Pennsylvania flight 93 will now be standard procedure: every passenger will just assume they are dead with maybe a slight glimmer of hope of survival if they dismantle the terorrists. 9/11 pretty much killed the viability of hijacking scenarios since now most people will assume that their aircraft has been turned into a cruise missile. Would you let the aircraft on which you're traveling be used as a weapon against thousands of people?
As usual we're fighting the last battle over again instead of trying to figure out what avenues of approach the terrorists will take next.
The pilot still has control of the plane, and can probably shake things up a little. Especially when the innocent passengers are wearing their seat belts, and the terrorist isn't.
I have a better, more proven technology that will foil hijack attempts. A lock.
Israeli airlines have done this years before 9/11.
A more technical solution would be to engage autopilot while overiding manual flight controls if the lock is breached and the plane contacts ground control and they have autopilot fly it to the closest airport.
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