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Fly-by-Wireless Plane Takes to the Sky
galactic_grub writes to tell us that engineers in Portugal have built and flown a plane with no wires or mechanical connections between the major systems, only a wireless network. From the article: "Tests flights carried out in Portugal have shown that the system works well. Cristina Santos, at Minho University in Portugal, who developed the plane, says the aim is primarily to reduce weight and power requirements. 'Also, if you do not have the cables then the system is much more flexible to changes,' she says."
PS - I note the next story on the front page is "IT: Wireless Security Attacks and Defenses." Coincidence? I think not
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Does an optical cable REALLY weigh that much that someone would want to replace it with wireless? This goes for any situation where functionality is considered to be important. I have a wireless network at home, but I've also run gigabit ethernet through the entire house. The wireless goes down from time to time, but the hard cable does not. The article talks about two benefits, weight reduction and power reduction. In both situations, I would expect that a single lightweight fiber connection and some LED lasers would not be significantly heaver, and would likely use a good deal less power... It just seems to me that the whole idea is little more than academic. I can't think of a single situation where it would be more desirable for a device like an automobile or an airplane to use a wireless system for communicating control information. Someone's got way too much free time on his hands...
Slashdot, where you get modded down as redundant for stating an opposing viewpoint... Independent thought anyone?
Such wireless links could be susceptible to electromagnetic interference or even jamming, Mellor suggests. And it could be more difficult to build in back-up wireless connections, he says. "If you jam one link you would jam both," he warns.
That's also my concern. A high powered transmitter is a lot easier to attack a plane with than a shoulder mounted rocket. (Which simply doesn't have the same range as a high powered transmitter.) A truck with a few generators in series would make for an excellent jamming platform.
There's also the concern of an onboard terrorist using implementation flaws to hack the airplane. The crew would have a deuce of a time trying to understand why they're locked out of their controls.
Some planes, such as the Boeing 777 even use optical fibres, which can carry multiple signals through a single cable.
IMNO, this makes a lot more sense. Optical busses between the necessary components are fast, lightweight, and easy to install. I can't see wireless saving more than a few kilograms over fibre connections.
That being said, in-flight entertainment systems might save weight if they weren't wired up. Running fibre for such systems results in a lot of unnecessary wiring and weight. Since the entertainment system is effectively a low-security system, airplane makers can feel free to use these linkages as long as the control systems remain wired.
She also admits that stringent aviation regulations may mean the technology first appears in cars rather than planes.
That makes even less sense. AFAIK, the horrid nests of wires that previously ran all of a car's electronics have been replaced by more standardized busses. The remaining wiring merely hooks a cars features into the power system. Unless I missed something, Bluetooth can not wirelessly provide power to accessories. Which means that they can't replace the wiring in cars anyway.
Hopefully we'll see this technology help with UAVs and other super-light aircraft. But I have no desire to fly on a plane that has its key systems hooked up through a technology that can be potentially interfered with by the cellphones the passengers are carrying.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The developer says:
I think that qualifies for understatement of the year.
Indiscriminate jamming isn't difficult. I used to hang out with a ham operator so old he had a 4-digit license. The guy had leydon jars made from all manner of old glass containers. He used to cackle with glee after applying the juice for a half-minute or so, then brag about how he had knocked out every TV and radio within a mile. I don't know about the range, but he sure managed to kill the TV and radio in his house by doing that. The point is that relying on wireless anything to stand between me and a flying machine suddenly dropping out of the sky strikes me (bad pun, I know) as a tad foolish.
Now, for deployment of cheaper, small drones in war zones against unsophisticated opponents, this might be a good strategy for making things more affordable. But for anything we might conceive of, today, as an "airplane," I just don't see it. I hope they get the problems worked out. That's what research is for and some really neat things might result. But my first reaction is pretty negative; it's just a weird idea. And it's posted right above a story on "Wireless Security Attacks and Defenses," fer Chrissakes!
Am I being too shortsighted, here?
Obviously the first thing they need to address is the possibility of a passenger hacking their wireless network and taking control of the plane. Or simply jamming the system to crash the plane.
Securing the network should be doable, but preventing jamming may be the problem that prevents this from becoming a real system.
Considering that every RF technology I've ever worked with has been imperfect, I'd hesitate to ride (or even fly) a wireless network controlled plane.
Here are some of the wireless technologies I know:
She states she is working on the reliability problem. I wonder if it's possible to solve (any EEs out there to chime in?). I used to work for a telcom, and they always had an interesting poster up describing what 99.99% accuracy meant. The most interesting representation: if commercial jets took off and landed at that rate of effieciency, there would be a failure every 10,000 landings/takeoffs. For the sake of simplifying, if there were 5,000 flights a day, that would be 10,000 landings plus takeoffs implying a statistical expectation of failure each day.
I don't know to what level RF can be perfected without some backup system (also RF) that would guarantee perfection but if they ever start flying those suckers, I'm going to wait a while before I board one.
A WiFi card and a copy of MS Flight Simulator and YOU, yes YOU are in charge.
BWAHAHAHAHA.
Composites are the future, Boeing's dreamliner and whatever Airbus's new airliner is are being made of more and more composites. Composites are strong, but composites are very flexible. They don't lend themselves well to control wires although cabling is acceptable if you have slack (which adds weight)... but movement is never a good thing so wireless kinda makes sense if you can make it fault-toloerant.
Great. Now how am I going to keep my cold pizza?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
This could be useful for combat aircraft, as you don't have to worry about losing control of a flap or other system because the cable was severed by enemy fire.
Also, with combat aircraft, you might be able to shield the interior of the aircraft such that it would be immune to jamming. That might be necessary anyway to prevent signal leakage that might give away the aircraft's location, either defeating stealth advanatages or allowing for another type of weapons lock.
but this is just plane silly!
Because you can - or because you should?
I really don't think that this is much of anything new. There's no reason why this couldn't have been done 20 years ago, or probably 50 years ago, had someone been sufficently motivated. You could do it with the same sort of PCM systems that are used in radio-controlled models, if all you wanted was controls.
But there's a reason why nobody has done this, and I think that's because it just seems like a really bad idea. There's no safe failure mode for a system like this. If the controls stop working, bad things happen. The only safe way to work around the interference issues would be to have wired backup controls, and at that point you've made the wireless system redundant anyway, because it's only advantageous if you can eliminate the wires.
A plane is always going to have some sort of mechanical connection between all of its parts (otherwise it wouldn't be a "plane," it would just be a collection of stuff moving in the same direction through the air), so I can't imagine that routing wires is really that difficult a proposition.
The only interesting application that I can think of this is perhaps a "semi-wireless" system. If your plane has a lot of metallic parts, maybe you could use the body as a single control wire to tie everything together. You use RF modulators, but rather than transmitting through the air, you just couple the transmitting and receiving antennas directly to contiguous metallic parts on the plane. I think that most of the metal parts on planes are bonded together anyway, to prevent static buildup, to this might be practical. In this case, the signal from the transmitter also attached to the same piece of metal elsewhere in the plane would be so much stronger than the signal from an external transmitter, interference might not be quite so much of a problem.
Still, I'm not sure I'd want to trust my life to it. I guess people probably said that about fly-by-wire originally, or by fly-by-hydraulic when it replaced steel cables, but there are generally good reasons why those transitions are made. I don't see a compelling reason for this.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...will come when a terrorist simply runs some script from his modified PDA/cellphone effectively blocking all inter-plane communication. Check out the wiki on Bluetooth for some glaring security issues already associated with bluetooth. What I'm curious about though is their supposed backup system. Are they going to end up installing old-fashioned wires as a backup and completely negate the weight savings of the bluetooth?
"By the same logic, if he has no good reason for what he says, he is just making noise and we need pay him no attention.
You still need to distribute power to wherever it's needed to both power the device you're controlling and power the wireless equipment, you're only removing a piece of control cable and replacing it with the electronics necessary to implement wireless connectivity in a reliable, redundant manner. Seems that would increase power requirements, what power consumer is being removed? Or are they planning on putting heavy batteries at each control site?
You could pick up the same weight savings (if any) by simply passing RF over the power cables (ala X-10, but made robust), and have more secure/robust communications than with wireless.
This just seems like a dumb idea.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Most of the early comments seem to be in the vein of "OMG wireless hax!", but consider a real worst-case scenario, like the one that brought down ValuJet 592. It was caused by a fire in the cargo hold that cut critical links between the cockpit controls and the hydraulic systems needed to keep the plane running.
As long as you have a physical connection from point A to point B, it is vulnerable to the most brute-force of DOS attacks: cut the connection and it's lost. A wireless link between the pilot and the control surfaces, on the other hand, can't be cut by a fire in the cargo hold, or even by a shoulder-fired missle (as long as it missed the kablooie stuff).
In a real-world application, I'd expect both wired/optical links *and* wireless backup links. Such a fully redundant system would work both as a sanity check (both systems should be reporting the same results) and as a backup (wired works when wireless is jammed, wireless works when wire is cut).
Plus, I can hardly wait for the netstumbler/kismet folks to write a monitor program to let me monitor things from the comfort of my tray table (on the emergency exit row, of course).
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Secondly, if it's used for navigation & engines, it's susceptible to remote hijacks - the Bluetooth "gun" featured on Slashdot before can blast Bluetooth signals over a mile and Bluetooth devices are forever being cracked due to poor security, including poor security of the protocol.
I agree that the cabling in modern planes is excessive and heavy. If we were talking about one optic fibre, that would be one thing, but aviation protocols seem to be point to point, not busses, so you need one physical or virtual connection for EVERY possible combination of end-points. Actually, triple that as they usually use triple redundancy. The aviation protocols are also loosely derived from RS232, so five or so lines are needed for each connection. With triple redundancy, this means that for every given pair of endpoints, you have 15 lines.
Optic fibre is better, but needs repeaters and complicates the endpoints as you have to figure out how to encode the lines into packet form. The problem isn't the data, the problem is the behaviour of the ARINC devices. You've got to mimic the behaviour and characteristice of the hardware they're expecting.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I doubt the actual steering controls of an airliner will ever be wireless. But I can envision many parts of the avionics system being wireless. If the air speed indicator, for instance, gets jammed, the airplane isn't going to suddenly drop out of the sky, though the crew may have to manually take over control of the aircraft. Things of that nature seem like a decent place to use wireless technology if it matures to the point where failure rates are along the same order of magnitude as their wired counterparts.
As a backup system, this would be a great idea. So if any leads get cut for whatever reason (explosion in cargo hold cuts lines to the elevators, for example) you'd still have some mechanism to maintain control. But I wouldn't rely on a solely wireless system.
Of course if you have the kind of damage that would cut electrical lines, you'll probably have lost hydraulics as well which isn't going to be fixed with a wireless network.
Okay, these guys are slow... real slow. They try stuff over and over a hundred times.
What they are doing, however, is separating the concept of control system from a bunch of wires down to a single signal containing a data stream.
When they figure out how vulnerable this is (and trust me, they will), they will try to figure out some other ways to deliver the data packets to the rest of the plane--at this point the design of microcontrollers at every interface point will have been completed and so all it will take is simply modifying the transport mechanism.
They will probably, at this point, figure out that a few fiber cables (say between 2 and 8 in redundant loops that each connect to every system like SONET) can deliver the signal just as easily and with little additional weight over wireless, and on top of that is virtually unhackable without physical access--even safer than copper.
Just give 'em time.
What happens when a bunch of planes are sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off? Are they all going to confuse each other (wirelessly)? Or is there some fancy signal hopping that the internal components do to avoid interference? That would be annoying if plane #8's jets reacted to plane #1's take-off, rammed plane #7 from the rear, and plane #1's engines mistakenly shut down due to plane #7's collision alarms... could be a chain reaction of yuckiness and fire...
Of course, it would be killer fun for a terrorist to bring some kind of jamming device onboard to disable the whole plane.
Sadly, the worst part would be waiting for the TSA to verify that your electric shaver wasn't said jamming device... they already treat laptops like dirty bombs...
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
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isn't this really a PROOF OF CONCEPT? the plane the portugese tested was 3 meters long... not big enough for human passengers. currently fly-by-wire has multiple paths to the same device for redundancy, so having a wireless connection would be a good thing. considering the fact that airplanes are basically metal tubes, there aren't too many pathways that could be considered truely redundant... no matter if the wiring is harnessed above/below/port/starboard of the cargo or passenger cabin, all paths are still running parallel to each other. the wireless connection would allow a redundant connection without a pathway limitation. as a response to the comment that wires don't take up too much space, try having 5 redundant connections from point a-b, and you're talking a minimum of 2 wires for the simplest circuit(on/off switch) per pathway. what happens when it's a system that requires multiple degrees of motion with feedback? you think 2 wires is gonna do that? fiber, maybe, but not copper. and when you consider the amount of cabling that goes into a passenger class jet, you be safe to bet there's probably 1/4-1/2 mile worth of wiring for all your electrical systems. saving space and weight can become an important issue. and lastly a comment about hacking/jamming/disruption of fly-by-wireless: any flight control system that would actually use wireless technology will not end up using a consumer band of wavelength, nor would it use consumer grade software protocols. airflight as a business is culturally too important and profitable to allow disruption by such commonly available technology. fly-by-wireless tehnology will end up being very expensive, and very difficult to compromise, licensed and regulated heavily, and will operate in a far different spectrum band than bluetooth or 802.11.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
The main reason they don't allow cell phones on planes is not the disruption of the airplane's systems. Rather, it's because the phone calls would jam the cell network, since you're violating two underlying design criteria:
--Joe
Program Intellivision!
They tried to remove having a cable between the cockpit and the rudder. They replaced it with "wireless", which means that that both ends need some sort of a sending/receiving device, which uses power, which is provided by a cable, which connects from the power source to both the cockpit and the rudder. So, no wires between the cockpit and the rudder, right?
This can be useful for military application. In the past, flight controls were mechanically linked or fire by wire, which means they all have some wire/cable/shaft..etc running through the plane and were subjected to damage especially in combat situations. While they usually have multiple backup systems, there have been cases that there were multiple failures due to enemy fire before. I can see the benefit of this wireless system can be use as a backup system.
Detectability.
People don't respect old mechanical controls, but they have one enviable attribute in that wear can be detected and measured before a failure occurs. All it requires is that someone pays attention. My JD-2 is wide open and I can inspect anything with nothing more than a hand mirror taped to a stick. Electric controls might be lighter than the 1"x.065 4130 tube running the length of the plane, but I'd never be able to feel the play increasing in a joystick.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba