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Pentagon Wants Kill Switch For Planes
mytrip writes "The Pentagon's non-lethal weapons division is looking for technologies that could 'disable' aircraft, before they can take off from a runway — or block the planes from flying over a given city or stretch of land. The Directorate's program managers don't mention how engineers might pull off such a kill switch. But, however it's done, they'd like to have a similar system for boats, as well. They're looking for a device that can, from 100 meters away, 'safely stop or significantly impede the movement' of vessels up to 40 feet long, with 'minimal collateral damage.'"
I say: "Attack vector".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
How the hell do they intend to pull that off without collateral damage. Force fields? Giant shark balloons?
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
If they have something that can disable a plane, how do the prevent malicious usage?
And then how can you prevent that kill switch from being disabled?
Boats aren't that complex, especially if you have a diesel engine, where electricity is not required.
Airplanes could be made without that special "feature".
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I don't think drug runners or terrorists are going to be using DRMed boats or planes.
Given how often tasers are used as pain-forced compliance devices as opposed to an alternative to an actual deadly force situation, I don't think non-lethal disabling technologies do anything but provide the government with media friendly ways to suppress dissent.
We are all just people.
Which would you rather be in: a train where the locomotive has a kill switch or a jet that has a kill switch?
Riiiight ... you've just lifted the wheels, and someone throws the kill switch. You "glide" back into the ground, with a full load of fuel, no power, no wheels, no control.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I distinctly remember that before the 911 attacks passengers were instructed to comply fully with hijackers. This was because it was thought that this would lessen the danger to passengers.
911 really blew the hijacker's wads, because there are no longer compliant airline passengers.
There will never be another hijacking unless the sole purpose is to crash the aircraft arbitrarily - in which case a kill switch wouldn't really hurt the hijacker's plans.
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Sorry to shout in the title (not really) but isn't it just obvious that all commercial aircraft should be fitted with some way to take remote control?
All you need is a few cameras, some electronics, a computer, and a radio. It isn't rocket science.
As for small private boats and cars, this is a phenominally stupid idea. First, it won't work. Any asshat looking to use a boat to blow something up is going to get the cheapest one available... which means one built in the 1980's wwithout any electronic controls at all.
Or they will buy a new one and just retrofit the damn thing to work around a kill switch. Just slap an old V8 in there, or build their own electronic fuel injection control (almost trivially easy) and shield the hell out of it and the kill switch is dead itself.
For large commercial jets, making them remote-able isn't a problem, and the airlines would go along with it for just the liability protection alone. For personal vehicles, fuhgeddaboudit.
You can't crash a boat like that into much of anything and do any serious damage(without a lot of explosives at least), you can't outrun a motor launch in one of those, and you're not likely to get in a situation where there's a lot of innocent people on one of them and they're not too hard to sink.
Here's a crazy thought .. instead of spending tens of billions to develop something like this (and billions more on other warsa nd weapons) why don't we remove our troops from the Middle East and stop meddling in their affairs to the point where we get thousands of people so pissed off at us they are willing to hijack planes and kill themselves to make their anger at us known. Just a thought ...
This is actually an entirely sensible thing to be researching. Currently, the only practical way to disable a flying aircraft under hostile control is to shoot it down, almost certainly killing everyone onboard. In the scenario where an aircraft is out of control or in hostile control, where the lives of the passengers are not expendable, a non-lethal weapon is very desirable indeed!
This will almost certainly not take the form of a 'kill-switch'. It will most likely be something like a low-level autopilot that diverts the plane, irrespective of control inputs, or something like a missile filled with sticky, drag-inducers that will cause the plane to come down quickly, but safely.
Inflammatory language like 'kill-switch' conjures paranoid visions of some bureaucraft bumping the wings-stay-on/wings-fall-off switch are simply not what is being sought.
Even in a regular general aviation plane with a real electrical system, all an EMP will do is fry the navigational and communications equipment. Unlike computer controlled fuel injectors, most small aircraft engines operate 100% mechanically. The control surfaces are all mechanical, except possibly for some "fancy options", such as an electrical trim system. But even then, electrical (non-electronic) equipment won't be damaged by an EMP.
EMP pulses break electronic things by inducing voltages high enough to destroy P-N junctions. They're not Star Wars tractor beams.
John
So if you're in the plane that's hit by the EMP, don't worry. It'll keep flying, and the pilot will still be able to navigate. He'll just have to use the mechanical instruments without relying on the fancy GPS and glass displays. Failure of the electronic systems, by the way, is a failure they practice in training and may be tested on.
Really, the only way an EMP would bring down a small plane is if the pilot had a pacemaker, and a pacemaker is pretty much going to get a pilot's medical certificate yanked anyway, so he'd no longer be flying.
John
For very large planes, you're quite right that it wouldn't work. I don't know if you can make a parachute big enough to support an airliner. For smaller planes, the devices are rocket deployed to get them out of the airstream, and the chutes are designed to arrest an out of control light plane.
Now, the plane will still be out of control on the chute--it's no longer steerable and will land somewhere random.
However, considering that an average light plane weighs less and has a carrying capacity far, far less than even a small SUV, anyone who wants to hijack one for terrorist use really needs a complimentary head examination. Not all that long after 9/11, an idiot kid under the influence of some of the prescription drugs we pump kids full of these days stole a fairly new Cessna 172 and rammed it full speed into a Tampa skyscraper. The result: besides killing himself, he broke a window (as in "a" window), destroyed a desk in the affected office, and of course made the media look stupid trying to draw parallels to 9/11 while saying dumbass things like wondering if the building was going to collapse. A little plywood and it was just fine.
Light planes make lousy terrorist weapons. Big planes are a potential problem, but this "solution" is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard of.
Locked door or not, after 9/11 it is no longer possible to hijack a plane and fly it into a building.
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Amen! Mark Twain said 'When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'. The stupid thing is they announce these hare-brained schemes without even realizing how dumb they sound. Our intellectual superiors should be tackling terrism at the roots, where future terrists are born, bred and indoctrinated. Instead these high-tech sort of solutions will cost $$$ and not give results. As Bruce says, all the terrists have to do is when planes get too hard blo up a shopping center or train which aren't well defended. They're assuming the terrists will use the exact same attack vector as they did last time.
And hey NSA: Why are you wasting time logging and reading my message? Why aren't you looking in the caves of North Pakistan for you-know-who? You guys get heaps of cash. Please spend it sensibly.
Sounds great until the pilot has a heart attack.
You live in a post-9/11 world. You're on a plane. Somebody gets up, pulls out a box cutter and starts threatening passengers in an attempt to get the cockpit open. Do you:
1. Open the cockpit and let him fly the plane into a building, or
2. Jump the motherfucker along with half the other passengers on the plane?
That's why he and I are so sure that it won't happen again. Like he said, policy used to be "do whatever they say" because the assumption was they just wanted to get someplace and run off. The assumption now is "they're going to fly this plane into a building," whether that's right or wrong. I don't know about you, but I assume my chances of survival to be pretty low if my plane is flown into a building, so I'm going to jump the fucks even if I do risk being spliced up potentially to the point of death. Death sucks pretty much either way for me, but I like my own odds better trying to do something to stop it and I acknowledge that if I'm a goner either way the best case is for there to be as few other deaths as manageable.
For that matter, terrorists are not stupid. 9/11 was a pretty brilliant plot: they identified weak points in a part of our country, including policy for how to react to what they were about to do and the fact that we were basically not looking; they exploited these weak points, poor policy decisions and general naiveté of the populace; and they did so in a way that made people literally terrified to use something that days before had been ingrained in our culture. They won't that round big time.
Do you really believe round two is going to be done in the same manner? In a place we've fortified, changed our policies about and are watching to the point of unhealthy obsession? They're going to look for the NEXT target where they can exploit their way to success--and I'm sure there are many of them. If I had to pick a place I felt the MOST safe from a terrorist attack post 9/11, it would be on an airplane. Hell, I'd be more afraid in the lines at the security checkpoints. If I were a terrorist, I'd detonate my bomb there.
It's not an impossibility, no; few things are when dealing with predicting human behaviors. But it's almost certainly low enough risk now that we don't need to be focusing all our energy there--and should never have been to begin with.
I wish we could at least mod articles. The Wired summary inserts the misleading phrase 'kill switch'. The Pentagon is merely looking for a method of disabling planes on the ground that isn't completely destructive and entail massive loss of life. Nothing remote going on here.
Or have a big foot that comes down out of a cloud, and stamps the plane onto the ground. Wait, that's Python...
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But then we wouldn't have funny films like Airplane, where the passenger gets to fly an airplane.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy