Posted on 02/26/2008 3:35:45 PM PST by Tank-FL
Last month, technology news sites and blogs breathlessly reported on a Federal Aviation Administration document suggesting that Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet may be vulnerable to computer hackers.
Boeing now says that the problem was fixed even before the FAA issued its warning. But there may be yet another way bad guys could get into the plane's control system, one that neither the company nor the FAA may have noticed.
The FAA was specifically concerned that a passenger could use the on-board entertainment network, which personal laptops can plug into, to access the plane's navigation system and disable or take over the plane.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
“I didn’t mean that hydraulic controls were foolproof”
Hey, sorry, I was joking at your expense. I know what you meant, was just poking fun......
Unless the two systems are designed independently, there's a risk that a systemic failure mode could hit both simultaneously. Even when using two independent designs, it's possible that some shared stimulus that wasn't anticipated by either design team could hit both systems and cause simultaneous failures.
I haven't flown any size of aircraft, but I would think that a pilot should, with a little practice, be able to fly and land an aircraft with a minimalist control system well enough to land the plane well enough for the passengers to survive even if the airframe may be damaged beyond repair. I would think the acceptable level of risk for trashing an airframe (bearing in mind that the pilot might land it undamaged even with the backup system) would be far above the acceptable level of risk for an all-hands crash.
Aaah, TRS80 memories....... Thanks for sharing and bringing back some nightmares! Man, we have come a looooong way
ditto
No kidding. Hard to comprehend sinking over three grand (in 1970s dollars!) into a flakey machine with 48KB of memory, and four floppies adding up to 2.8MB -- with a black and white monitor, and two "sounds" (the two relays inside, one of which gave a soft click, the other of which gave a loud click -- I used them for kkeybboard eefectts (that bbouncy kkeyboard really got OLD in a hurry) -- a soft click while typing a character key, and a loud click when hitting the Enter key -- I wrote my own key entry routine, hated the stock BASIC Input function; mine let me tell it a maximum size for the string, would not allow "bad" keys (like messing up the screen, etc.) -- so, it was easy to add OUT commands to click the relays. Woo hoo.)
The amount of money I soaked into that thing, sheesh...
Some years back, there was a Japanese 747, full of passengers, which had a sudden loss of control surfaces -- the rudder fell off.
The pilots managed to keep it airborn for quite some time, but eventually, they all died. I cannot comprehend the horror...
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