Britain's CAA Considers Laptop Ban on Commercial Aircraft 384
hayb writes "An article in Britain's The Register claims that NASA and United Airlines have conducted tests on various aircraft and have found that ultra-wideband (UWB) devices "knocked out" collision-avoidance systems and impaired instrument landing systems.
It states that the blanket ban on all devices in necessary because flight crews do not have the knowledge to differentiate between standard notebooks and ones with UWB devices."
Re:Technology out of date? (Score:1, Insightful)
Eeek (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than just try and ban the devices shouldn't they be working on methods of blocking the signals? Or altering the collision avoidance systems to cope with the interferrance?? Doesn't this smack of really bad shortsightedness?? Even if UWB is several years away, spark-gap transmitters ought to be homebuildable and with far more power than the average UWB transmitter.
I might be giving away ideas here, but doubt that terrorists read
Just a thought, these things crop up when people try one solution to a problem, but they are just trying to prevent it. And even though people say prevention is better than cure, cure is far more reliable.
Z.
P.S. Sorry to bring the 'terrorist' angle up again but this strikes me as a stupid thing to do, even if it never occurs. When you have people's lives at risk it ought to be cure, not a reliance on prevention.
yes and no (Score:2, Insightful)
That doesn't indicate that a blanket ban is "necessary". That implies just that a blanket ban is either easier or cheaper for the airline than actually training their flight crews how to differentiate.
Re:heh, way to go (Score:4, Insightful)
It's certainly not beyond question just because it's good for safety. Safety at any price is a bad idea. If it costs $1 billion per life saved, you can save a lot more lives by spending the same money on preventive health care.
Stability And Security (Score:5, Insightful)
What we appear to have is a claim that airplane electronics are extraordinarily open to interference from consumer devices. They are so open, that such devices may indeed accidentally trigger safety-critical failures in the operating environment.
Lets assume this is true.
Now understand, that which can be accidental does not need to be.
If one can accidentally down a plane with a gameboy, it stands to reason that one may be able to intentionally down the plane with the very same gameboy -- easier, in fact, because the attacker knows exactly which frequencies to exploit. This is...disturbing. I cannot imagine it very difficult to stow any form of consumer electronics, even with a "time delay" activation, inside of luggage or carryon.
Now, I'm not afraid of gameboys. See, I've *met* Boeing safety engineers. Hell, I've quoted em, learned a bit from em. Paranoid doesn't begin to describe them. These guys imagine everything, and implying that they didn't budget for even a miniscule amount of shielding and noise resistance...it's almost insulting.
Hell, you don't see planes crash every time the sun decides to belch out a few terajoules of flare in our direction. Not to mention the basic design of a fuselage bears some resemblance to an EM-blocking faraday cage.
Granted, it may very well be this same paranoia that allows those same engineers to say "Please, no new equipment, we couldn't test with that precise radio environment". The *world* is an unpredictable precise radio environment, and unfortunately, so now are its residents. I hate to say it, but if a plane can't survive a ringing cell phone, it ain't Nokia who's to blame.
That being said, the UWB failure are interesting: If the claim is that UWB operates below the noise floor relative to a given frequency, then the question becomes how did the collision avoidance systems even *detect* UWB transmissions, unless they themselves operate in a baseband manner?
One answer is that noise floors might be relative: A nearby transmitter emitting weakly across all frequencies might be overpowering the far away signal tranmitting on one. This is...hard to believe, but not impossible.
I suppose that's my biggest problem with the consumer electronics ban: Since it's inconceivable that planes are actually vulnerable to random noise from consumer electronics, *all* device-level concerns become suspect. That's annoying.
If somebody -- anybody -- has evidence they feel I should see, feel free to contact me here or in email.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Re:Get real! Take me to x or i'll unplug my headph (Score:2, Insightful)
Using the same logic: (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how the slide starts....
This is why the old air traffic control works (Score:3, Insightful)
Old the system made use of paper strips that track the planes. The cool thing about the paper system is that when the power goes out or the scope reboots or whatever, the controller has a bunch of paper strips to look at and know whats going on. All the controller needs is a radio and they can get all the planes down.
Australia has a "modern" ATC system and I've got to talk to three different people to groups to fly into the general aviation airoport in Melbourne if I come from the north. In the US, that would be two. The controllers here out number the ones in the US and can't cope with a much lighter load. The new system for London has had major issues since it was turned on.
General rules for programming have been discovered. Most of them have been used in the Kansas City freight yards for a long time.--Derrick Lehmer (1949) from Knuth Vol1
Two-faced slashdotters (Score:1, Insightful)
The goverment (i.e., NASA) and the airline industry (i.e., United) look at a new technology to see if it could cause any problems. Instead of being aplauded for looking to the future, they are being lambasted for doing it all wrong. As the article notes, authorities recognize that more research is needed before a ban is implemented, but that it is wise to look into it further.
Get off your conspiracy theories. Sometimes people are just doing they're jobs. Just because they used the word "laptop" doesn't mean there's a global conspiracy against them. I'm sure to keep the business traveler happy, the airline industry would rather modify the UWB standard than ban it.
Re:Stability And Security (Score:3, Insightful)
Now understand, that which can be accidental does not need to be.
One factor that we must remember is that permission to use a device applies to all the passengers, but malicious intent is rare. It may well be the case that one or a few devices can be tolerated, but dozens or hundreds cause a problem. For example, the one cellphone activated by a terrorist may not do much harm, but when every passenger calls to say "we are just landing", that may be more of a problem.
One passenger using one device may not do much harm, just as killing one whale, using one CFC aerosol, cutting down one tree etc. does not do much harm. If we want to be sure that the devices are safe, we have to think in terms of every passenger being wired up like a christmas tree with every combination of devices. It may be beyond the average, but I would not want to be crew on a flight taking people to the UberGeek Convention if there is no restriction on passengers' use of electronic and radiating devices.
So who can easily tell if a laptop +UWM and - UWB (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm not scared of flying.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Even small training aircraft such as the one I'm learning to fly in have redundancy of vital systems - two fuel pumps, two ignition systems, two radios.
Aviation is very conservative. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" appears to be the motto. Any new development has to be proven to be just as safe as what is currently in use and fully ratified by the aviation authority of the country in question, i.e. the CAA in the UK, the FAA in the USA. So a new development in avionics can take years to come into practical use.
That said, the technology is filtering down, so now you're finding light aircraft with glass cockpits (i.e. LCD instrument panels instead of dials), sidesticks, TCAS, HUDs etc.
Solve the real problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a story of how the US managed to capture a Soviet MIG sometime during the 70's (I think). They took it apart and found that the Soviets were still using vacuum tubes. The problem was not that the Soviets couldn't use microchips. They chose vacuum tubes to protect against EMP and to not have the added weight of shielding. I am not suggesting we retrofit modern airlines with vacuum tubes, what I am suggesting is that the dangers of RF and EMP attacks be properly accounted for, and if they currently are then to drop the bunk about "interference with navigation and communications systems."
Faraday Cage? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or is there some reason for putting radio navigation receiving equipment in the passenger cabin?
Re:Mod braindead (Score:2, Insightful)
I basically had a senior engineer (and pilot) tell me, during one conversation, that with two pieces of tape stuck to the windshield, the pilot would be able to fly the plane.
Now, I'm not saying that this banning of all electronic devices, UWB or not is good or bad - I'm specifically responding to the claim that the pilot would be unable to fly the plane (successfully!) if the fly-by-wire systems failed. Such a scenario (being wholly dependent on the computers) would likely not receive approval from the FAA, btw.
Incidentally, if I may be allowed to weigh in on the topic at hand, it appears that the main threat of these UWB devices is that they override the signals being received by certain electronics in the plane, specifically the TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system), which receives transponders signals from nearby planes and provides information to the ND (navigational display) to map the location of an aircraft and its threat level (based on altitude, flight path and proximity). In this particular instance, the only sheilding that would be of any benefit would be sheilding the passenger cabin from everything. This, however, would be exceedingly difficult since antennae are located everywhere and *most* of the material currently used in the aircraft (including the windows, the floor, etc.) would need to be replaced with material that shields these signals. Never mind the retrofitting that would be necessary, such a solution is entirely intractable.
I'm not certain what the best solution for something like this is, but it would seem to me that the FCC isn't properly doing its job if its allowing devices to be created that cause interference outside of their immediate area. It should be the responsibility of the UWB emitting device manufacturer to ensure that within a radius of a foot or so from the device, the signal strength is inconsequential (e.g. below a threshold set by the FCC which is dictated by the minimum signal strength a TCAS system requires to register a "valid" signal). Obviously this doesn't protect against rogue devices, but that's not entirely hopeless: if a pilot notices his TCAS is malfunctioning, he'll likely declare an emergency situation or at the very least, turn back to his home airport (if its closest) and inform ATC (air traffic control) of his condition. ATC will then take it upon themselves to keep the sky clear around this aircraft and inform nearby aircrafts of the situation (not *really* necessary since their TCAS will still work since the afflicted system is still broadcasting TCAS information, it just can't receive it properly).
In the meantime, the pilot will announce on the PA that this situation is in progress, the flight attendants will check for any electronic devices - if this check fails, the plane will land and the ground crew will scan for the origin of the device and then track what person it belongs to, who can expect fines or other punishment for interfering with the airline.
Not entirely an unmanageable situation, you see. I find it very unlikely that someone will be able to universally kill TCAS around an airport and even so, TCAS is a last-ditch solution that prevents collisions. ATC's job is to prevent a situation from developing in which TCAS would even be used! Remember, not every aircraft in an airspace has TCAS - not by a long shot. A good deal of aircraft, both commercial and private, large and small, do not have TCAS systems! Obviously we still make do with the current situation!!
Hope this clears some confusion up!
Cheers.
Re:Mod braindead (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, as for flying conditions that require instruments - yes, these occur and to take into account these situations, careful thought ought to be applied. As for circling over the ocean for three hours, I imagine that the GPS driven FMC would keep the plane on course just fine, UWB jamming or not. And either way, I imagine the pilot will notice unusual course deviations, if the FMC system is indeed telling the Autopilot incorrect information. Most flight paths are straight - circling over the ocean wouldn't constitute a "normal" flight path, would it? Didn't think so.
Either way, my statement about the FCC regulating UWB emitting devices stands - if the only thing that needs to be worried about is "malicious" UWB devices, that can be addressed differently.