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Access Codes For United Cockpit Doors Accidentally Posted Online (techcrunch.com)
According to the Wall Street Journal, the access codes to United's cockpit doors were accidentally posted on a public website by a flight attendant. "[United Continental Holdings], which owns United Airlines and United Express, asked pilots to follow security procedures already in use, including visually confirming someone's identity before they are allowed onto the flight deck even if they enter the correct security code into the cockpit door's keypad," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The Air Line Pilots Association, a union that represents 55,000 pilots in the U.S. and Canada, told the WSJ on Sunday that the problem had been fixed. The notable thing about this security breach is that it was caused by human error, not a hack, and illustrates how vulnerable cockpits are to intruders despite existing safety procedures. The Air Line Pilots Association has advocated for secondary barriers made from mesh or steel cables to be installed on cockpits doors to make it harder to break into, but airlines have said that they aren't necessary.
It is 0000
1... 2... 3... 4........ 5
The bigger question is why they have set codes at all. There are only a set number of people on each flight who might need to access the cockpit. They should really just have the pilots set a code before anybody else boards the plane, and have the relevant people notified of the code before the flight. Even better if the code is random generated by a computer.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
According to French and German prosecutors, the crash was deliberately caused by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz.[29][97][98] Brice Robin said Lubitz was initially courteous to Captain Sondenheimer during the first part of the flight, then became "curt" when the captain began the mid-flight briefing on the planned landing.[99] Robin said when the captain returned from a probable toilet break and tried to enter the cockpit, Lubitz had locked the door.[29][97] The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel can be disabled from the cockpit controls.[7][100] The captain requested re-entry using the intercom; he knocked and then banged on the door, but received no response.[101] The captain then tried to break down the door.[16][77][102] During the descent, the co-pilot did not respond to questions from air traffic control and did not transmit a distress call.[103] Robin said contact from the Marseille air traffic control tower, the captain's attempts to break in, and Lubitz's steady breathing were audible on the cockpit voice recording.[97][104] The screams of passengers in the last moments before impact were also heard on the recording.[99]
After their initial analysis of the aircraft's flight data recorder, the BEA concluded that Lubitz deliberately crashed the aircraft. He had set the autopilot to descend to 100 feet (30 m) and accelerated the speed of the descending aircraft several times thereafter.[105][106] The aircraft was travelling at 700 kilometres per hour (430 mph) when it crashed into the mountain.[99] The BEA preliminary report into the crash was published on 6 May 2015, six weeks later. It confirmed the initial analysis of the aircraft's flight data recorder and revealed that during the earlier outbound Flight 9524 from Düsseldorf to Barcelona, Lubitz had practised setting the autopilot altitude dial to 100 feet several times while the captain was out of the cockpit.[107][108]
Here, have a link to a paper:
"The first part of this paper presents an experimental investigation on explosive spalling of six full-scale normal strength reinforced concrete slabs subjected to conventional fire curve ISO834 and severe hydrocarbon fire curve, performed at the Fire Research Centre, University of Ulster, UK focusing on concrete thermal behaviour and the explosive spalling phenomenon. Each slab was loaded with 65% of its BS8110 design load and was heated from the bottom side only. Temperatures profile was recorded at three depths within the slabs and the moisture content was also measured before and after the tests."
If that's not enough info for you, you can read this entire PhD thesis on the topic.
i.e. at high temperatures high-strength concrete comes apart. If the temperature is high enough it will lose all cohesion.
The airplanes were fully fueled. The fuel basically ignited on crash and flooded the top floors and then dripped down over the elevator shafts and stairs. The temperature was high enough that the concrete lost cohesion and you basically ended up with what looked like a controlled implosion. OBL was a civil engineer. He certainly had the know how to analyze the problem and know this would happen in the first place.
That and manual deadlocks on the inside.
The reasons airlines don't want to put them in?
* Expense (because retrofits on existing planes isn't just "EXPENSIVE!!!", it's "FUCKING EXPENSIVE!!!" * Weight savings. A reinforced door and manual/ratcheted lock bar could easily add another 5-800 lbs to a plane. That's EASILY 3-5 passenger fares.
Save money vs save the crew's life? Fuck the crew! SAVE THE MONEY!
Aircraft crews are trained to repel attackers, quite a few in the US are armed now with the FFDO program, there are simple methods beyond a lock that can slow down any attempt to open the cockpit door by force (for example on MD-80 type aircraft, simply putting down the jumpseat would slow anyone down), and as a last resort they literally have a weapon on hand (the crash ax). Also, especially in the US, there is a very good chance that at least one of the cockpit crew is former military and has had self defense training. You're partially right in that it is about saving money, but it's saving money because there are more cost effective ways of protecting the cockpit and cockpit crews.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Like all truthers, you are a crushing bore.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Technology for remote (or alternatively autonomous) operation is existing, it 'only' needs certification for passenger transport.
It would need a little more than just certification.
People always go "80% of crashes are due to pilot error, so let's get rid of the pilots, the autopilot can fly the plane by itself anyway". What they don't know, is how often automation screws up and no crash occurs because the pilots were there to prevent it. In 20 years of flying I've had quite a few of those.
In fact, a lot of "pilot error" crashes were really due to automation failures where the pilots were (rightfully) blamed for not having intervened. Autothrottle pulls the throttles back to idle at 1000 ft because a failing radio altimeter said the plane was about to touch down? Pilot error, they should have seen the throttles move backward and the speed decrease, and should have immediately reacted by taking manual control. As other pilots have on numerous occasions.
Another example, the Air France flight from Rio that stalled and crashed into the Atlantic. Yes, the pilots stalled the airplane. But the only reason they were flying manually was because the automation had already given up. The same situation had already occurred with other crews and they had corrected the situation without crashing.
Take the pilots out, with the current state of technology, and you'll see two orders of magnitude more crashes.
How many military drones do they have flying around? Only a few, a ridiculously small number compared to passenger aircraft, yet drone crashes are a pretty frequent occurrence. Even though their missions are usually extremely simple: take off in good weather, fly a predetermined GPS trajectory, come back along a fixed trajectory and land in good weather. And they are vastly simpler mechanically because they don't need things like air conditioning, seats, etc. Yet they crash all the time.
Come on, we can't even write a word processor or spreadsheet that doesn't crash occasionally, and you want to make automatic planes?
I appreciate your attempt to use logic and facts by providing links to a paper that showed that concrete can lose cohesion just like in the events of 9/11, but people who want to believe nutty conspiracy theories aren't going to change. Dilbert creator Scott Adams is a big Trump supporter and he sometimes allows comments to his blog and some of them are pretty nutty. One lady was ranting, yesterday I think, about how Obama's birth certificate was clearly faked. If all these years later we've still got people worked up about the birth certificate, and that's not even touching the fact that even if it was faked (which I don't believe) he was born a US citizen and thus eligible to run for president, how we know that Ted Cruz was born in Canada and he was still OK to run for president because he had one US citizen parent (even if Obama was born in Kenya, his mother was still a US citizen) and nobody complains about him, and how the entire Republican Party was unwilling or unable to provide proof of this to try to win elections against him. People are just going to believe what they want regardless of the facts. Adams himself even says as much all the time.
The airplanes were fully fueled. The fuel basically ignited on crash and flooded the top floors and then dripped down over the elevator shafts and stairs.
Also: The pilots banked the planes just before impact, so the fuel was distributed across at least three floors. (You can see it happen in the film of the second plane's impact.)
Once enough (say, three) floors had collapsed onto one below, the load on that floor was enough to detach it from the sides of the building (where the vertical strength was) and drop that weight plus the weight of another floor onto the one below that. repeat down to ground level.
The detached floors were the horizontal strength, so when enough were down in the middle of the tower, the side walls buckled and the upper part came down (tilting slightly as the sidewall collapse was slightly uneven).
No mystery at all, once you know even a little about how the building was constructed.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way