Slashdot Mirror
US Government Probes Airplane Vulnerabilities, Says Airline Hack Is 'Only a Matter of Time' (vice.com)
Joseph Cox, writing for Motherboard: U.S. government researchers believe it is only a matter of time before a cybersecurity breach on an airline occurs, according to government documents obtained by Motherboard. The comment was included in a recent presentation talking about efforts to uncover vulnerabilities in widely used commercial aircraft, building on research in which a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) team successfully remotely hacked a Boeing 737.
The documents, which include internal presentations and risk assessments, indicate researchers working on behalf of the DHS may have already conducted another test against an aircraft. They also show what the US government anticipates would happen after an aircraft hack, and how planes still in use have little or no cybersecurity protections in place.
"Potential of catastrophic disaster is inherently greater in an airborne vehicle," a section of a presentation dated this year from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy government research laboratory, reads. Those particular slides are focused on PNNL's findings around aviation cybersecurity. "A matter of time before a cyber security breach on an airline occurs," the document adds.
The documents, which include internal presentations and risk assessments, indicate researchers working on behalf of the DHS may have already conducted another test against an aircraft. They also show what the US government anticipates would happen after an aircraft hack, and how planes still in use have little or no cybersecurity protections in place.
"Potential of catastrophic disaster is inherently greater in an airborne vehicle," a section of a presentation dated this year from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy government research laboratory, reads. Those particular slides are focused on PNNL's findings around aviation cybersecurity. "A matter of time before a cyber security breach on an airline occurs," the document adds.
Obligatory DEFCON Talk
https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-22/dc-22-presentations/Polstra/DEFCON-22-Phil-Polstra-Cyber-hijacking-Airplanes-Truth-or-Fiction-Updated.pdf
I thought this was 23 but it was actually 22. Getting old.
The point of my recommendation is to connect the pilot back to all of the stick and rudder skills, including proficiency in handling stalls as well as smooth stick and rudder operations. The corporate landing mandate can be handled by taking over on the final approach, but I want the guy to be able to hand fly the airplane and demonstrate proficiency in stick and rudder skill (including shit you don't want to do with passengers, such as side slips and power-on and power-off stalls).
Remember, the guy who managed to put down the Gimli Glider (Air Canada Flight 143) happened to also be an experienced glider pilot, so by accident he happened to be in the right place at the right time.
I don't like luck.
Well, of course it was a gross oversimplification; I summed up a chain of events and circumstances and training and inputs and actions that can trace their roots back minutes, and even hours, back before the actual crash took place, into two pithy sentences.
But at the bottom of the stack, the airplane hit the water in a nose-up stall, having held the nose-up stall for several minutes as the plane descended from 30,000 feet to sea level. The plane hit the water in a nose-up stall because the co-pilot was pulling up on the yoke--countermanding the inputs from the pilot, without indicating who was in charge of the airplane. And the airplane maintained a nose-up stall through several minutes because the co-pilot was putting the wrong inputs on the controls, in almost complete contradiction to all the training he received--since there are no slow-speed aircraft attitudes where recovery is achieved by pulling the nose up. Zero. None. The only time you pull the yoke back to recover the aircraft is either (a) if you have an indication that you are going too fast, or (b) you're panicked and are trying to gain altitude. If you have the yoke up and the altimeter is unwinding, the hardest god damned thing in the world to do is the thing that will save your life, the thing the pilot of that aircraft was trying to do but the thing the co-pilot refused to try, is to push the nose down.
Now how we got to here--that's important. And probably more important than the co-pilot making a rookie mistake--because if we stop with "the co-pilot is an idiot", rather than trying to determine if there is something more we can do to assure greater safety in commercial flight, we've basically thrown up our hands and said "sometimes people die."
And that is unacceptable.
(Frankly, by the way, I wish more organizations or corporations thought like the FAA--which, when faced with pilot error, tries to understand why there was pilot error. They try to figure out if it was information overload or improper inputs or inattentiveness or improper training. They try to figure out how we can make flying safe, even with imperfect pilots and imperfect equipment.)
Now, I had a CFI who once told me that the people he hated the most to give checkrides to were commercial pilots. Because none of these guys have really had to do any real stick-and-rudder work since they first started working for the large commercial airlines. One of the scariest thing he's ever done is to give a particular older pilot--retiring from the airlines and who bought his own little 4 seater prop airplane to continue to tool around in the air--a quick refresher in stalls. Because this guy seemed hell bent on doing exactly the wrong thing when the airplane started to buffet in that prelude to a stall, once nearly putting the aircraft into a fatal spin because he simply didn't know how to use the rudder.
It's why my wish is for all commercial pilots to spend some time each month in a Cessna 172, practicing things like power-on and power-off stalls.
Because I honestly and sincerely think if that co-pilot had recent experience with stalls, rather than (as is typical for a lot of those bus drivers) not having done stall work or rudder work for perhaps a decade or more, the 216 people who died aboard Air France 447 would be alive today.
On an airbus plane in normal law they are trained that the airplane will not allow them to stall and they can pull back all they like. So when the pilot sees indications that the plane is descending he pulls back, expecting the airplane to do whatever it needs to maintain controlled flight and eventually climb.
The problem is that when you lose normal law and go into direct law the airplane doesn't have the stall protections so you have to remember to push forward until you get the airspeed.
The fundamental problem is that because of all the protections built in Airbus airplanes pilots fly the plane differently when in normal law vs when things go bad and they go into direct law.
Flying in direct law is a 1X10^-9 probability event so when it does happen noone is ready for it.