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Access codes for United cockpit doors accidentally posted online
- westworld_ 10y agoThis doesn't seem as bad as when the TSA published pictures of their master keys - it sounds like the codes have already been changed & the pilots still have to do visual confirmation even if a correct code was used. The endless struggle between convenience and security continues. Considering the statistics I actually think the airline industry and its associated governing bodies have accomplished an incredible feat of balancing these two sides of the seesaw. It can be a hassle flying, but there are 895 million passenger trips per year in the US (stat from 2015) and the last fatal US passenger airliner accident was in 2009! I'd worry much more about new regulations pushing large quantities of Li-Ion batteries into airplane holds than about these cabin access codes being published.
- froindt 10y ago>and the last fatal US passenger airliner accident was in 2009! Asiana flight 214 (San Francisco crash with the fake names announced by a major news outlet) was in 2013. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
- alistairSH 10y ago<pedant>Asiana isn't an American airline</pedant> Either way, the main point still holds - the American airline industry, along with its foreign counterparts in Europe and Asian, do an amazing job keeping the flying public safe.
- mikeash 10y agoIt really is amazing that we can go years between fatalities. To put it in perspective, air travel in the US involves about 10% of the passenger-miles of road travel. If air travel had a similar fatality rate as road travel, then we'd see 3,000-4,000 fatalities per year from airliner crashes, in the US alone.
- froindt 10y agoSorry, I misread it as last airline crash in the US.
- saurik 10y agoMy first thought was "aren't these rotated often? even just generated for every flight?", but then I rapidly thought about who would need to set them, and I decided it strange that the flight attendant would know the password at all... if the goal is to protect against an attacker, giving the password to anyone outside of the cockpit just makes them a target and a weakness; but once you go that far, I wonder why they need access codes at all?... the pilots should just lock themselves into the cockpit and they need neither a key nor an access code at that point, right? Isn't this needless complexity to have these codes?
- rangibaby 10y agoThere may be a situation where both pilots are unable to fly the plane and need help or first aid e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 > At 11:49, flight attendant Andreas Prodromou entered the cockpit and sat down in the captain's seat, having remained conscious by using a portable oxygen supply. Prodromou held a UK Commercial Pilot License, but was not qualified to fly the Boeing 737. Crash investigators concluded that Prodromou's experience was insufficient for him to gain control of the aircraft under the circumstances. Prodromou waved at the F16s very briefly, but almost as soon as he entered the cockpit, the left engine flamed out due to fuel exhaustion and the plane left the holding pattern and started to descend. Ten minutes after the loss of power from the left engine, the right engine also flamed out, and just before 12:04 the aircraft crashed into hills near Grammatiko. There were no survivors.
- LoSboccacc 10y agoand Trans American Flight 209
- 8draco8 10y agoSometimes allowing pilots to close them self inside a cockpit could end up badly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
- closeparen 10y ago
- oliv__ 10y agoWhy is Techcrunch writing about this?
- liberte82 10y agoTrump, is that you?