Cell Phones As Weapons?

EarlyMon said:

Ok.

For years, you've been carrying much more processing power than the nav computer on the Apollos that went to the moon.

How are we not ready for this level of technology, and what level might that be?

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The level where we stop trying to take a communication tool and turning it into a weapon. A level where we stop trying to fit our entire lives into it, and figure out how to spend time with our families. One where we stop figuring out how to make them smarter, and start working about how to make our children smarter.
That's the level we should be at. Right now, we're more concerned with keeping up with, and maintaining, the technology we have created. That makes us slaves to it, when it should be the other way around.

Kamau said:

The level where we stop trying to take a communication tool and turning it into a weapon. A level where we stop trying to fit our entire lives into it, and figure out how to spend time with our families. One where we stop figuring out how to make them smarter, and start working about how to make our children smarter.
That's the level we should be at. Right now, we're more concerned with keeping up with, and maintaining, the technology we have created. That makes us slaves to it, when it should be the other way around.

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You may be right.

I think everyone's mileage varies on that, but it seems that part of our world has been going in that direction for some time, I agree.

SiempreTuna said:

I thought he was only using ACARS as a vehicle to get his code into the 'Fight Management System' (whatever that is - my limit with aircraft comms is "Bandit at 6 o'clock").

Is that possible? Are the two connected?

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No, they're not. And that's why the story falls apart.

The major component that stands between ACARS and all flight controls is the pilot. Even if someone could send a false ACARS message (which is pretty much like sending a text, except it usually gets printed out and read from hard copy) to the flight crew, telling them to crash the plane or something like that, it's extremely doubtful that they'd comply.

This less-than-news viral blog story reminds me a lot of one of the "9-11 truther" conspiracy theory myths that claimed that all airliners, regardless of type or age, had HAL9000-style master computers on board that allowed "the government" to take control of an airliner against the will of the flight crew. Needless to say, it's just a myth. Nothing even close to that exists, primarily because of the potential for sabotage. It's technically possible, but no sane airline pilot would walk onto a plane with a system like that! :laugh:

If you're interested in how a FMS could actually crash a plane, the case of American Airlines Flight 965 is a good study. In that case the flight crew got disorientated and thought that they were coming in to land in Cali, Columbia (at night) when they were actually flying over a mountainous area. When they descended to land, the plane crashed into a mountain.

The role that the FMS played was small but significant. Because it has a crude interface compared to a regular computer or smart phone, the system had a text completion function that helped the pilot punch in the code for the wrong navigation beacon. If this "helper" function wasn't there, the crash may not have happened. But since most crashes result from a large number of mistakes, not one single failure, that's not entirely certain. (Note that my knowledge of this crash goes far beyond what Wikipedia shows.) What the incident does show is just how many things must go wrong all at the same time before anything life-threatening can happen. The whole system has so many built-in checks and balances that it's virtually impossible for one person to spoof data without a lot of people noticing and taking corrective actions.

Topics merged.

See link above this post.

with deference to the true expers replying to this thread, I'll just say that a few hours spent viewing some of the DEVCON presentations,, I am not so sure anyone can say that a cell could not be used as a "weapon."

THREAD HIJACK:

I have seen (DEVCON) examples of where the ATC system is "taken over" so to speak and false images and data is fed to the ATC folks. A few other things that bother me to some extent.

That is all I be sayin'

quest7 said:

FAA: No, You Can't Take Down a Plane With an Android App

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Thanks for that bit of news.

One important point that the FAA and EASA didn't mention was that the Honeywell NZ-2000 gets its data from a data loader that, depending on the model, accepts floppy disks or USB thumb drives. Neither type of data loader accepts data from a radio or any other source that's not directly under the control of someone in command of the aircraft.

While it's true that an increasing amount of flight and terminal information is being sent to pilots using data links, it should be noted that the primary reason for doing this has been to fix problems that are inherent in receiving spoken communications over AM or SSB voice radios, and copying what is heard onto a piece of paper. In the past, more than a few fatal crashes have had poor voice communications as a contributing factor. The most notable of these is the crash of two 747 aircraft on the runway at Los Rodeos airport, Tenerife, Canary Islands. The Tenerife disaster had a complex cause, like all airliner crashes. But one major contributor to the crash was that two people transmitted simultaneously on the same frequency, causing a key warning to be missed by every flight crew at Los Rodeos.

To this day the Tenerife disaster remains the single largest loss of human life in the history of civil aviation. It was certainly a turning point for improved ground to flight deck communications. So the notion that the systems that were put in place specifically to learn from past mistakes and save lives are somehow more hazardous couldn't be further from the truth.