Pilotless planes: BBC editorial

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20191003-the-three-things-that-could-kill-the-pilotless-airliner

Some comments from me as an avionics engineer.

In 2008, government regulators warned that the Dreamliner's flight control system could be accessed via the airplane's entertainment system, allowing passengers to override pilot commands. According to a government document, the airplane's design allowed for "new kinds of passenger connectivity to previously isolated data networks connected to systems that perform functions required for the safe operation of the airplane".

No. The FAA issued Special Conditions to make sure that for these new, yet to be build systems, there was given ample thought to the design to not allow anybody to access systems not intended to be accessed. There never was such a hole found on the 787. I have to live by the same Issue Papers daily and no, they are not based on existing problems, because then we would have Airworthiness Directives to disable stuff immediately. Although zero day problems may not be made public, by the usual process that hopes to close the hole before it is exploited in the wild.

More recently, a team of professionals managed to remotely hack a Boeing 757 using radio waves.

No. Hacking (which is a word that changes meaning every year) nowadays means breaking in and doing something to the system to alter it. What the researchers did was to use existing systems and some ingeniuity to use them to read out data that was not originally advertised as being readable. Like, the GPS position of the aircraft (if it had GPS). But this is not the same as overriding the GPS and driving the aircraft into a mountain. There is a lot of difference between reading data that flows through wires but cannot be changed because the wires are unidirectional, and establishing control presence inside the FCC to actually do something. I'm not saying it is all okay but everybody with a receiver can tap into ACARS and everybody with a transmitter can jam ACARS and all other pilot VHF comms. This is not considered a problem, because there are mitigations in place already. So don't overhype the matter.


Hoppie