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Boeing 787s To Create Half a Terabyte of Data Per Flight
Qedward writes "Virgin Atlantic is preparing for a significant increase in data as it embraces the Internet of Things, with a new fleet of highly connected planes each expected to create over half a terabyte of data per flight. IT director David Bulman said: 'The latest planes we are getting, the Boeing 787s, are incredibly connected. Literally every piece of that plane has an internet connection, from the engines, to the flaps, to the landing gear. If there is a problem with one of the engines we will know before it lands to make sure that we have the parts there. It is getting to the point where each different part of the plane is telling us what it is doing as the flight is going on. We can get upwards of half a terabyte of data from a single flight from all of the different devices which are internet connected.'"
What could go wrong?
welcome our new data loving overlords!
Wait, does posting as an AC mean that I give or don't give a rat's ass to someone who cares? I'm so confused!
I wonder what would be the length of the RJ45 cable though
It would be cool if one could play back that data in a flight simulator to recreate the flight.
dave@console:~ ssh dave@hal-787
[dave@hal-787 ~]$ echo "1" >
echo: I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.
[dave@hal-787 ~]$ sudo echo "1" >
dave@console:~ Connection to hal-787 lost.
Connecting flight controls to "The Internet" would be the stupidest of all ideas. If they do this, anyone getting on board would be a candidate for the Darwin awards.
I'm sure they meant to say that all these systems are networked together, using ARINC or other aviation network technologies.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Who's the first to hack those planes and connect them to flightgear. Passenger plane UAV!
Hopefully he's just abusing the word 'Internet'
I see this as next level for all the hackers: let the airlines do all the unnecessary orders based on signals from hacked plane. Mile high club got just new meaning.
[[ Literally every piece of that plane has an internet connection ]]
I'm sure that's not actually true. Seats? Toilets? Overhead bins? Main wing spar?
Sources say it's an XML dump. Maybe 100KB of actual data in there.
You'll need some big Li batteries to power all that....oh wait....
on fire
there is a difference between internet (any internetwork) and the Internet (a worldwide publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks)
Isn't it funny? After pointing out yesterday that Virgin hire a reputation management company which scans the internet 24/7 to scrub any news which might tarnish Virgin's carefully massaged reputation we have a topic submitted to buff Virgin's image as a trend setter. The reality is Virgin just asset strip other people's ideas and sell them as their own. There's nothing special (or even nice) about Virgin. They just want your money.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
My lord, that's like a whole 19 or 20 signals 16 bit digitized at 1 Meg Sa/S over an 8 hour flight.
Finally it makes sense, the plane (which is often in the clouds) generates data (which is stored in the cloud.)
Because all 787s are grounded. Perhaps Boeing should have concentrated on the basics for a bit longer instead of the frivolous nonsense that is nothing more than a tickbox on a marketing sheet.
1) How often do they update the virus scanner on their toilets ?
2) Is ssh enabled on their engines ? Are the engines protected against "shutdown -h -t now" commands ?
3) Can I upload video player software to the cockpit screens ? I mean, looking at those indicators the entire flight is soooo boring !
Have been doing this for years. They constantly stream data to RR HQ and theres a team of highly experienced people watching the data. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPIYBgZNrsg&sns=tw
What percent of that "data" is bad scripting, really bad mark-up and AdSense shit? Is there maybe an address like "m.part_number.plane_number.location.internalsite.boeingcorp.com" so the people who fix the problems can get the info without being tracked and spammed by OK Cupid and 100 different tool sellers?
Hopefully they will be using Windows 8 and not Linux, try and keep the Washington companies together ya know.
"We can get upwards of half a terabyte of data from a single flight". Well, provided they're actually able to fly, which is not the case, last time I checked.
Cue the consultants and bullshit artists.
I still have to turn my Kindle off during take-off and landing.
That must be some wicked-fast in-flight Internet connection they have...
I use about 160GB/month, and my ISP considers me an abuser.
LZMA is Boeing's friend.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
0.5 TB about how your flight is late or cancelled and there's nothing anyone can do about about anything ever.
Normally that would be a whole TB, that is when the plane makes a whole flight.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Another quick search on ARINC 664 yields the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avionics_Full-Duplex_Switched_Ethernet
So both the Airbus 380 and the 787 use COTS hardware and Ethernet, as does the Internet. Although slightly sloppy, describing the network as an "internet" is technically correct. Asserting that the data is "bloated XML" or that their is bad scripting, spam or cookies involved is grossly stupid.
I have worked with previous ARINC formats, and the data is very compact. It fact, it is positively cryptic, and generally you use software to turn it into a more human friendly form, like a line graph. So if there is a half terabyte per flight, it is all "real" data. Any of the posts that assume otherwise are a combination of arrogance and ignorance, which is typical for what passes as comments on Slashdot these days. Hence my sig:
Why is Snark Required?
Stuxnet.
Depends, If they're just censors with no tie-in to the aircraft's operation then there shouldn't be any issue. But that needs to be in the form of hardware or air-gap, not some software setting that can likely be overridden remotely. The only way I would see this kind of functionality being safe is if the aircraft basically has two health monitoring systems, one used by the cockpit which has NO communications ability. And the other which can communicate and does have passive only access to the aircraft's censors, but is otherwise is physically disconnected from any of the aircraft's control systems.
And lets hope the server controlling the engine is not written in PHP or something
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
so that's 0B total
...could a discussion about plane travel and safety descend into a bickering about the correct use of the Linux console...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...to "cloud" computing!
Where do I sign up?
John Deere has a variety of satellite-guided systems that can be implemented, and there are a few methods to monitor and program firmware over a wireless connection (I don't know the exact communications medium, it's not my field). Suggesting that there is 500+GB isn't unlikely, because I use CAN to interact with the hardware that we test, and a few seconds of reading a few variables can easily be 1MB.
Here's my quick number-crunching output: .0278GB / sec of data being recorded .0278GB/s = 28.4MB/s = 29127KB/s = 29826162 bytes / second .asc or .blf, etc, that breaks down to roughly 124000 things reporting every 100ms. My guess is that there are probably messages transmitted to the ground every minute or thirty seconds, or about 3MB per data burst.
500GB / 5 hours (estimate average flight including prep) = 100GB / hour
100GB / 60min / 60sec =
If it's anything like the CAN system here, they'll probably have 16 byte messages, depending on how it's subdivided. A lot of things report at 1000ms intervals, but more critical ones report at 100ms or faster.
29826162 byte / 24 byte / 10 ms =
Assuming they use 16 byte messages with 8 character message IDs logged to
So who is going to pay to archive all that data? I don't think it is now, but how soon will it be before the Feds (NTSB) require that the data be permanently archived. I could see storing it for a maintenance cycle (in case of an accident or crash), but the Feds love to use any information available for surveillance purposes.
... it's an adventure.
Useless when cabin goes on fire
That's not a ton of data if it's log-style data. If you aren't likely to need quick access to the archived data, you can use an ultra-efficient (but slow) compression like PAQ to compress a 500GB log file into something on the order of 1GB. If you're archiving more than one flight at a time and have a ton of RAM you can take advantage of solid archiving to achieve even better compression. You could probably fit a month's worth of flight data onto a single Blu-ray disk.
I sure hope they're using IPv6 ;)
Don't worry. It's got battery backups.
Oops!
Have gnu, will travel.
After talking to a friend in the biz, he's most likely talking about a mutated version of ARINC664 with a downlink thrown in. Which is different to Airbus's mutated version of ARINC664.
(Probably anyway; I deal with ships. We have things like IEC 61162 instead.)
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Internet connected toilet reports an increase in poop from yesterday.
OMG, could have I been right 15 years ago when I perceived sudo as a security hole? Still nowadays, no system I have the last say on have sudo enabled...
In init scripts, to start gpg-agent as root so it runs under user nobody which has a nologin shell, I use:
eval `/usr/local/bin/gpg-agent-copy-nobody --daemon`
with gpg-agent-copy-nobody suid nobody: /usr/local/bin/gpg-agent-copy-nobody /usr/local/bin/gpg-agent-copy-nobody*
# ls -al
-rwsr-x--- 1 nobody root 1238888 Mar 02 2013
I never seemed any gain in using sudo, especially when most sysadmin allow users to do "sudo bash".
Sudo could nevertheless be used in some setup where you really want to manage what users are allowed to do but I have never seen it used as it should be yet. It's like: "we are using sudo therefore we are more secure"
So, in all cases that I have witnessed, you could do "sudo bash". This makes sudo another complex thing to maintain and patch therefore a potential security hole while, in that context, it doesn't protect you from anything compared to plain su.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
OMG, could have I been right 15 years ago when I perceived sudo as a security hole?
Yes, sudo is a security hole.
I never seemed any gain in using sudo, especially when most sysadmin allow users to do "sudo bash".
Not only is it usually allowed, it's actually very difficult to prevent a user with sudo rights from being able to escalate that to a root shell. Read the sudo man page regarding shell escapes. "Due to the large number of programs that offer shell escapes, restricting users to the set of programs that do not is often unworkable. and "Note that restricting shell escapes is not a panacea."
... and what if some user uploads a statically compiled bash binary (cleverly named something else) and sudo's *that*?
it doesn't protect you from anything compared to plain su.
Whoa, there... that's a bridge too far.
sudo prevents you from having to share a single root password with everyone who needs to su. It's much easier to revoke an individual user's sudo rights than it is to come up with a new root password and communicate it with "everyone but the now-revoked person". Besides, people are more likely to share a root password that "everyone knows" than they are to share their personal login creds.
Besides, you can setup nice logging with sudo that gives you per-user security audits. This is useful in professional circumstances, because it allows you to enforce policies like "do not sudo a shell, or you will be fired". And if someone *does* "sudo su" and then nukes the security audit log to cover their tracks then that's not only a termination-worthy offense, it's also likely a criminal act in many jurisdictions.
And, yes, I have configured sudo on production machines for users who were restricted to executing only a handful of explicitly designated scripts, so sudo *was* far more secure than giving them su in that context.
Sudo vs. su on your machine at home for which you are the only person with a login? Meh. It doesn't really matter, so go with your preference.