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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..."
Something called WEP.
... looking for technologies that could 'disable' aircraft, before they can take off from a runway
Delta seems to have the edge on this market already.
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
Reading a bit further the RFP noted the Pentagon would really like a pony.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Yeh, and then some evil types of people or even pranksters (on ground, or by using a so-configured laptop or camcorder or hand-held game) might figure out how to:
-- boost the reception range in order to deceive or seduce the cockpit,
-- bypass security (long accept command if wheels up, over 100 kph indicated, if turbines over 25%, if altimeter log indicates movement inconsistent with runway traffic...), to force unwitting external (non-pilot) command input
-- trick the ground-based systems to interfere with runway traffic to cause on-ground, or taxi-vs land traffic...
-- trigger false halts and false diverts to wreak havoc upon ATC or military airspace controllers when the aircraft (in real-time or by delayed instruction) fail to "squawk" back...
then all hell could break loose. Don't think I wanna be on one of those planes... nor near one...
Basically, they want radio-controlled, perimeter-restricted shopping carts that work on the ground or in the air.... roi...ght....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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.
exhaust pipes!
And what will plug and exhaust pipe non-lethally?
Potatoes!
ergo we need to genetically engineer jet-engine size potatoes and precision potato canons.
Profit!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Reapers or Raptors, the results can end up pretty grim...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I'm sure they could install a special system that interfaces with the plane's electronics and GPS system and shuts down the plane's engine upon receiving an encrypted request from the Pentagon. The only problem with this is how are you going to install this on all private planes? Who's going to pay for it and are they going to pay for electronic upgrades for all planes as well?
As for boats, how in the world are they planning on stopping sail boats? Most smaller boats (16-24 feet or so) don't even have outboard motors let alone any electronics. Are they going to require motorized sails on the boats that will roll the sails up on command? Or an anchor dropping mechanism? How do you deal with small boats that are just a fiberglass hull, mast, and sail?
*shudders thinking about stepping on anything with a "KILL SWITCH"*
I've really gotta stop reading slashdot, to save my health.
Which would you rather be in: a train where the locomotive has a kill switch or a jet that has a kill switch?
let's call it the Freedom Protection Toggle.
There was discussion on Slashdot about the Soft Walls Project that did something similar. See the 1/04 and 7/03 discussions.
What I find interesting is just how vehement software engineers and pilots are about the idea, and yet everyone seems to trust fly-by-wire.
There is Soft Walls FAQ that covers common objections.
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.
A "kill switch" as of now means an F-18A intercepting it and shooting it down.
The term "kill switch" was a journalistic flair added by Wired, and doesn't actually occur anywhere in the Request for Proposals.
Perhaps if we built a large wooden badger...
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
You misunderstand. They aren't looking for some sort of kill switch to be built into the aircraft, despite the reporter's use of that phrase. They want a "nonlethal" weapon to use against aircraft.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
We don't yet know what caused the crash of the Boeing 777 BA038 crash at Heathrow in january but this post on the reg makes an interesting suggestion.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This is an idea that goes back to a book I read in the '80s about UFOs. First let me say that I realize that as a source for information, it rates right up there with the Institute for Intellegent Design, but bear with me. In the book, it was noted that during UFO sightings, car engines tend to stop running, while once the UFO departs, the car works just fine. Afterwards, mechanics can find nothing wrong with the engine or electrical system. The author hypothesized that some sort of directed beam of microwaves could temporarily short out the car's battery. Sounds like exactly what the Pentagon is looking for; they just need to review the archives at Area 51.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
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.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
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.
I want a kill switch for the pentagon
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 ...
The solution to aircraft hijackings has be listed in post hijacking reports since the 1960s. Strengthen the flight deck walls and door and keep the door locked. If this had been done 9/11 could never have happened. After all, if the Israeli airline could do it why couldn't everyone else.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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.
Tracks lead into major cities. A freight train can have 100 cars, each carrying 100 tons - 10 kilotons total. If the load happens to be explosive, it will demolish the whole city. Such things happened before, unintentionally.
I'd like one for bureaucrats.
Typical moronic Pentagon mentality. Plan for what's already happened and won't happen again. Something that would accomplish this will cost billions, probably not work on motors that were protected by the proverbial tinfoil hat, and could be defeated by a pissed-off 10-year-old with two cell phones and a pack of bubble gum.
There's times when technology and politics meet in a very ugly, venal way. This is one of those times. It has "Pork Barrel" written all over it.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Locked door or not, after 9/11 it is no longer possible to hijack a plane and fly it into a building.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
Using the 'noone can get to the cockpit' thought, have the cockpit be a separate unit entirely: an armoured capsule at the front of the plane. Having it only accessible via an external door, you limit hijacking to before takeoff, or by terrorists with jetpacks. No real risk of forced entry then, and you limit options in a hostage situation (they can't demand control, only negotiate destination).
There's a way to do this right. Read this article about the F-16 GCAS. This is a ground collision avoidance system that works so well it can be used on combat missions, including flying through mountain passes at 500 knots, 200 feet from rock. Pilots call it "You can't fly any lower". When the Auto-GCAS decides a ground collision is imminent, it takes over the aircraft, rolls to wings-level and initiates a pull-up. (In an F-16, the roll is at 180 degrees per second and the pull-up is at 5G; for an airliner, much lower numbers would be configured and recovery would be initiated much sooner.) Read the article; fighter jocks liked the thing, and those guys usually hate letting the automation take over the aircraft.
This would prevent most "controlled flight into terrain" accidents (there are about three of those involving commercial jets per year, worldwide), so there's a big win in having this independent of military/terrorism worries. Once you have a system like this, it can be given "no-fly" areas into which it won't let the plane go. If you're going to enforce "no-fly" zones via hardware, it's better to do it through a system that knows about terrain and is looking at it with radar.
The way to do overrides would be to give the pilot a switch to turn off the system in an emergency, but doing so sends out an emergency transponder signal that this has been done. The ground then has the option of sending up a suitably encrypted signal to turn it back on. This gives a way to handle system failures. If the ground sees a plane heading somewhere it shouldn't be, the ground can force the system back on.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Airbus starts offering something like this. (Airbus takes the position that the aircraft should protect itself against pilot errors. Boeing has the philosophy that the pilot should always be able to override the automation. The Boeing approach worked better back when the typical airline pilot had 10,000 hours, a previous military flying career, and was chosen competitively from a big pool of applicants.)
As someone else pointed out, what gave the 9/11 hijackers an advantage was that SOP was to give in to hijacker demands and everyone would be okay. The authorities could try to catch them later. Now, if anyone tries a hijacking, everyone will try to kill them. The passengers will figure they have nothing to lose since, if they don't try to kill the hijackers, they will all die anyway.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The alternative could be to allow for remote controlling of the aircraft from another nearby aircraft or some location using the internet. Could be intercepted by some cyberterrists, so may be a bad idea. But then again, this may be applied to the similar idea of "kill switches."
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.
If the door opens inward, it cannot be opened during flight due to the pressure difference between the in- and outside of the craft.
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
but isn't it just obvious that all commercial aircraft should be fitted with some way to take remote control?
Close, but this can be abused. The better solution is an automated landing system with a failsafe.
Basically, if the pilot (or whoever you enable on the flight, stewardesses, whatever) gets scared enough he initiates an automated landing that can't be overridden without replacing the airplane's control system.
The system finds the nearest capable landing site without severe weather, declares an emergency, and puts the plane down on whichever runway is currently designated for emergencies. The weather and designations would have to be broadcast or updated before take-off (signed, of course). Sort out the mess on the ground. If the pilot panicked, a mechanic replaces the proper modules and the plane is basically just delayed.
We have such systems in use in the military - they can put an F-14 down on the deck of a carrier under full power in at least 20 foot seas, and hit within something like 4' of the ideal spot to catch the cable. Coming into O'Hare shouldn't be a problem.
We *don't* want ground control.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
This risk is mitigated via use of an innovation referred to as a "co-pilot".
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking terrorists on this motherfucking plane!
The Omagh bomb was made from fertilizer and that did plenty of damage.
No sig today...
Right, The Terrerist and a team of twenty Boeing engineers manage to pack the necessary equipment to steer a plane onto one (we're talking a few duffel bags here, those cockpits have a damn lot of buttons in 'em), then take control of the plane, then somehow get their equipment from the inaccessible storage part of the aircraft, then slash their way through to cabling that's not usually accessible in-flight (and takes hours to get to when grounded), then cuts those cables, reattaches them to their own system and finally get to actually pilot the plane.
Unfortunately, right after that, Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks a tricycle that Bruce Willis rode through Area 51 to save E.T. right up into the stratosphere where it smashes into an exploding asteroid seventeen times the size of the sun, thereby breaking said asteroid into twenty-two pieces. The single large piece proceeds to not hit earth and destroy civilization by four meters (it breaks off the antennas of both the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building), the smaller ones are deflected by some jedis with light sabres, only to hit The Terrerist and each one of the Evil Engineers right into the face, killing them. Also, explosions, a sex scene without the girl taking her bra off, a scene in a strip bar and more explosions.
What they needed was an equalizer. Something small and compact like a S&W M&P 45 with hollow points would take care of business.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
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