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Boeing 787 "Blacklisted" From Some Air Traffic Control Services (flightglobal.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A software glitch causes the Boeing 787 to report its position incorrectly, which has led Australia and Canada to 'blacklist' the aircraft from using ADB-S and until it is resolved the latest Boeing is treated as an aircraft without ADS-B capabilities. The practical implication is that the aircraft is not allowed to use reduced separation procedures and an maximum altitude limit of 29,000 feet was also considered. Boeing denies that the bug causes a safety hazard because existing services (radar) still allow safe operation. A bugfix is coming to restore ADS-B functionality.
It's graceful degradation.
as that can end deadly.
... instead of ATC relying on radar. What could possibly go wrong?
Nav Canada first detected a problem on 1 July 2014 when controllers noticed a 787 appearing to deviate up to 38nm (70km) from its planned track. The controllers alerted the crew by radio, but the pilots insisted their instruments showed they were still on course. Suddenly, however, the 787 “was observed jumping back to the flight plan route” on the controller’s screens, according to ICAO documents.
I'm sorry, but if a plane is reporting that it is 70km from where it actually is, that's no small deviation. That deviation is more than 10 times the required flight separation. It may not pose a safety hazard once controllers already know they have to fall back to the older system. But before this was discovered? That's a HUGE safety hazard. The only reason they can get away with claiming it wasn't a safety hazard was because they lucked out and the system only screwed up when there were no other planes around
We just had a nice post of folks ability to detect BS, so here's a test.
In rare cases, after passing a planned turn upon crossing a waypoint, the data packets that arrived at the transponder would contain either the aircraft’s latitude or longitude, but not both. In those cases, the ADS-B transponder’s software would extrapolate the 787’s position based on the previous flight track before it made a planned turn at a waypoint. It would continue reporting the aircraft erroneously on the incorrect track until it received a data packet containing both the latitude and the longitude of the aircraft.
“It is important to understand that this is not a safety concern,” Boeing says. “Existing systems such as radar provide the necessary positional data to [air traffic control] that allow the continued safe operation of the fleet.”
Have gnu, will travel.
"an maximum altitude" -- typo, or Euro-grammar gone too far?! It's getting so hard to tell anymore.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I love summaries that assume people know acronyms.
Since the summary uses both without explanation, what's the difference between ADB-S v ADS-B?
Why are they blacklsited from using ADB-S until ADS-B functionality is restored?
It is the intent of the world's aviation organizations, driven by the U.S. FAA and their NextGen ATC modernization initiative, that conventional RADAR will eventually be replaced by the ADB-S or similar self identifying and locating system.
What could possibly go wrong, right?
...which is all I care about.
"A bugfix is coming to restore ADS-B functionality."
$adsb.model = "777-200ER";
In May Boeing revealed a software bug that could completely lose electrical power generation in 787 aircraft. Apparently a 32bit millisecond counter overflowed after about about 2 month incrementing. This is an elementary mistake and should have been caught in software design reviews. I have no idea what the problem is with the ADS-B system but perhaps there is an issue with Boing's software development process.
Perhaps the bug is really a hidden feature, only revealed by accident. ( This is a shoe in for a Bruce Schneier's Movie Plot Scenario )
Deeply buried in the ADS-B firmware is an emergency setting which, should the Department of Homeland Security get a credible security theatre warning that criminals with smartphones and GPS guided drones are planning to bring down airliners. All airliners with updated ADS-B firmware will report their position as exactly 70nm away from their real position on a pseudo-randomly generated bearing keyed on the date. Thus all participating aircraft are equally displaced in the same direction by the same amount.
As to them darn foreigners, well we shoot them down first to clear the skies lest our majestic fleet become damaged.
You guys have them on the runway anyways.
I log ADS-B traffic to a PostGIS DB, and as part of the deduplication and data cleaning process, I look at the position reports, time & distance between them and the logged speed to see if they make sense. I sometimes have to add a fudge factor of up to 50km. ADS-B packets can get corrupted in ways that dump1090 can't fix up or detect, and I thought that the errors were due to that. Dump1090 has its own quirks when you're pulling position reports down from its JSON interface, but it's easier than pulling the ADS-B messages directly from its other interfaces and attempting to reconstruct the plane's track from that.
ADS-B has zero security controls. Someone with a simple transmitter could draw a murder of giant dicks swarming in three dimensional space using A-380s as pixels. It's hilariously bad.
FOR SHAME! It's ADS-B not ADB-S.
All share equipment and data streams. So what are the odds that a 787 broadcasting a bad position is also fooling surrounding aircraft into a collision avoidance maneuver (false positive) or tricking them into thinking the affected aircraft is not in conflict (false negative)?
In busy airspace, pilots cannot rely solely on ATC to maintain separation. So that's why these collision avoidance technologies were developed. Shame if they don't work correctly.
Have gnu, will travel.