Hijacking via Android?
April 12, 2013
This is my preemptive plea, an open letter to the media, to rein in this silly airplane story before it gets too much traction.
Im talking about the story, which began making rounds on Thursday, about the possibility of using Android devices or similar gadgets to hijack or take over commercial airplanes by inputting rouge data to the planes ACARS or FMS units.
If you dont know what Im talking about, good. If you do know, please dont take it too seriously.
On the one hand, Hugo Teso, the person behind this lecture/experiment, has a solid understanding of how planes fly, and is presumably familiar with the way pilots and their technology interact. Unfortunately, hes extrapolating wildly or the media is extrapolating wildly and giving people the entirely wrong impression. What could be an interesting conversation is instead being dumbed down into alarmist nonsense.
ACARS is an air-to-ground communications system that allows messages to be sent back and forth over VHF radio frequencies or satellite link. The FMS, or flight management system, is the proverbial computer that you sometimes hear pilots mention. It presents an electronic, integrated blueprint of a flight the various courses, altitudes and speeds that well be flying at between city A and city B which the planes autoflight system or the pilots, when flying manually then follow. This blueprint is based on a slew of manually and/or electronically inputted data. Much of this is data is loaded prior to departure, but a flight is very organic. Our headings, altitudes, speeds, arrival and departure patterns, etc., are never forecast with certainty from the start. FMS data is subject to numerous updates and revisions over the course of a flight. Usually these changes are entered manually by the crew. Occasionally they are sent automatically from air traffic control or company dispatchers.
Teso wants you to believe your smartphone can send these instructions as well, causing a dangerous disruption.
The problem is, the FMS and certainly not ACARS does not directly control an airplane the way people think it does, and the way, with respect to this story, media reports are implying. Neither the FMS nor the autopilot flies the plane. The crew flies the plane through these components. We tell it what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Whatever data finds its way into the FMS, and regardless of where its coming from, it still needs to make sense to the crew. If it doesnt, were not going to allow the plane, or ourselves, to follow it.
The sorts of disruptions that might arise arent anything a crew couldnt notice and easily override. The FMS cannot say to the plane, descend toward the ground now! or Slow to stall speed now! or Turn left and fly into that building! It doesnt work that way. What you might see would be something like an en route waypoint that would, if followed, carry you astray of course, or an altitude thats out of whack with what ATC or the charts tells you it ought to be. That sort of thing. Anything weird or unsafe an incorrect course or altitude would be corrected very quickly by the pilots.
Several websites that have picked up the story seem to contradict this by claiming that many modern planes lack analog instruments or have autopilot systems that cannot be switched off, etc., etc. basically claiming that pilots would be unable to recognize or react in time to pirate uplinks. For instance, in this report, it states: A pilot could thwart an attack by taking the plane out of autopilot although he pointed out that several newer systems no longer include manual controls.
This is simply false.
To be clear, none of this is to suggest that beaming uninvited data into the electronic architecture of the cockpit is a good or safe idea. Of course it is not. That it might be possible is, to be sure, a cause for alarm, and Im more than a little dismayed that Mr. Teso is cavalier enough to openly share how such a thing might be done. But, even so, this is not by any stretch the sort of imminent threat people are being led to think it is. Scary words like hijack and takeover have no place in this conversation.
