4 ms·

wow, I came here to comment that of course passengers can't hack an airplane, at least in the sense of taking control of it, because there's no way that anyone

by simg 3y ago

wow, I came here to comment that of course passengers can't hack an airplane, at least in the sense of taking control of it, because there's no way that anyone with half a brain wouldn't have an absolute air gap between the passenger facing systems and the flight control systems. still not sure I believe it!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
winternewt 3y ago
Your car has the same problem
- JadeNB 3y ago
  > Your car has the same problem My car is much less likely to be carrying hundreds of unidentified passengers, though, and any individual passenger messing around is harder to miss.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    But more prone to infotainment saturating the CAN bus. Infotainment can be hacked using the 5G connection facilities which no-one takes seriously. The CAN bus also drives the brakes. I wouldn’t say it’s as easy as cutting the brake cables in 1950, but it’s as efficient.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      > cutting the brake cables in 1950 Service brakes were typically hydraulic long before 1950. Only parking brakes would have been cable operated on the overwhelming majority of cars on the road in 1950 (or since).
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    If a car can receive OTA updates it can receive OTA hacks, no passenger in car required.
    - JadeNB 3y ago
      > If a car can receive OTA updates it can receive OTA hacks, no passenger in car required. True, but that seems like a different threat model—the title is "Can a Passenger Hack an Airplane?", so I was taking the analogue to be "Can a Passenger Hack a Car?" Specifically, the response > Your car has the same problem (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423710) was to > wow, I came here to comment that of course passengers can't hack an airplane, at least in the sense of taking control of it, because there's no way that anyone with half a brain wouldn't have an absolute air gap between the passenger facing systems and the flight control systems. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421652), meaning, I assume, that my car has the problem that there isn't such an air gap.
      - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
        Probably. I have a rust bucket, but it seems that a lot of newer models use bluetooth to pair phones with cars. I assume that car manufacturers have baked in at least some level of security to prevent every nearby rando from hijacking the car with bluetooth, but you know what they say about assumptions. And if the call is coming from inside the car (aka every passenger wants to play a different song and they all bombard the infotainment system with requests), are you just SOL?
- davidw 3y ago
  No one takes car safety very seriously though. Air travel has a better record of trying to eliminate dangerous things.
croes 3y ago
After the Boing 737 Max disaster you still believe plane manufacturers don't make crude mistakes?
- Veserv 3y ago
  The 737 MAX was not a "crude mistake". The failure mode was a multiple independent root cause sequence of low probability events. If I remember correctly there were about 200,000 flights before it was grounded after two airframe losses which is a failure rate of 1 in 100,000 flights, 5 9s, which, when accounting for the average flight distance, is about as dangerous as driving per passenger-km. People downplay it as a "crude mistake" to claim that the people at Boeing are idiots who could have avoided the problem if they just applied average techniques and common sense. No, preventing these types of problems requires extremely sophisticated safety engineering the likes of which no other industry even attempts. Other industries have dreams about making systems as safe as cars; in aerospace they have nightmares about making systems that are only as safe as cars. The Boeing 737 MAX was a disaster because they made a plane around 100x-1000x more dangerous than average. It is unacceptable to have such a massive safety regression. But claiming it was a "crude" or stupid mistake is absurd. It was a extremely sophisticated mistake that demands a return to the extremely sophisticated safety engineering normally employed when designing aircraft.
  - avar 3y ago
    The only reason for that system to exist is because the 737 MAX is effectively a flying flight simulator for earlier versions of the 737, because Boeing and particularly Southwest didn't want to spend the money to recertify pilots on a "new" type of aircraft. So yes, it's pretty much a crude hack that wasn't needed for any objective reason other than to save some money for shareholders, and now people are dead.
  - dataflow 3y ago
    You're quite mistaken AFAIK. > The failure mode was a multiple independent root cause sequence of low probability events. If I remember correctly there were about 200,000 flights before it was grounded after two airframe losses which is a failure rate of 1 in 100,000 flights [...] > preventing these types of problems "1 on 100,000" is not a "type of problem". Just because an event is rare that doesn't mean it's some kind of niche scenario that's hard to prevent. If you actually look at reports of what they did wrong (which you did not do at all), you see there were plenty of actions that went against safe engineering judgment. (And no, I'm not referring to mine or other randos', but those of actual engineers and pilots.) They blew past multiple safeguards in the process, which made unlucky events fatal. It didn't need to be that way, and it wasn't that way for other planes either.

by simg 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

winternewt 3y ago

Your car has the same problem

JadeNB 3y ago
> Your car has the same problem My car is much less likely to be carrying hundreds of unidentified passengers, though, and any individual passenger messing around is harder to miss.
- eastbound 3y ago
  But more prone to infotainment saturating the CAN bus. Infotainment can be hacked using the 5G connection facilities which no-one takes seriously. The CAN bus also drives the brakes. I wouldn’t say it’s as easy as cutting the brake cables in 1950, but it’s as efficient.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    > cutting the brake cables in 1950 Service brakes were typically hydraulic long before 1950. Only parking brakes would have been cable operated on the overwhelming majority of cars on the road in 1950 (or since).
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  If a car can receive OTA updates it can receive OTA hacks, no passenger in car required.
  - JadeNB 3y ago
    > If a car can receive OTA updates it can receive OTA hacks, no passenger in car required. True, but that seems like a different threat model—the title is "Can a Passenger Hack an Airplane?", so I was taking the analogue to be "Can a Passenger Hack a Car?" Specifically, the response > Your car has the same problem (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423710) was to > wow, I came here to comment that of course passengers can't hack an airplane, at least in the sense of taking control of it, because there's no way that anyone with half a brain wouldn't have an absolute air gap between the passenger facing systems and the flight control systems. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38421652), meaning, I assume, that my car has the problem that there isn't such an air gap.
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      Probably. I have a rust bucket, but it seems that a lot of newer models use bluetooth to pair phones with cars. I assume that car manufacturers have baked in at least some level of security to prevent every nearby rando from hijacking the car with bluetooth, but you know what they say about assumptions. And if the call is coming from inside the car (aka every passenger wants to play a different song and they all bombard the infotainment system with requests), are you just SOL?
davidw 3y ago
No one takes car safety very seriously though. Air travel has a better record of trying to eliminate dangerous things.

croes 3y ago

After the Boing 737 Max disaster you still believe plane manufacturers don't make crude mistakes?

Veserv 3y ago
The 737 MAX was not a "crude mistake". The failure mode was a multiple independent root cause sequence of low probability events. If I remember correctly there were about 200,000 flights before it was grounded after two airframe losses which is a failure rate of 1 in 100,000 flights, 5 9s, which, when accounting for the average flight distance, is about as dangerous as driving per passenger-km. People downplay it as a "crude mistake" to claim that the people at Boeing are idiots who could have avoided the problem if they just applied average techniques and common sense. No, preventing these types of problems requires extremely sophisticated safety engineering the likes of which no other industry even attempts. Other industries have dreams about making systems as safe as cars; in aerospace they have nightmares about making systems that are only as safe as cars. The Boeing 737 MAX was a disaster because they made a plane around 100x-1000x more dangerous than average. It is unacceptable to have such a massive safety regression. But claiming it was a "crude" or stupid mistake is absurd. It was a extremely sophisticated mistake that demands a return to the extremely sophisticated safety engineering normally employed when designing aircraft.
- avar 3y ago
  The only reason for that system to exist is because the 737 MAX is effectively a flying flight simulator for earlier versions of the 737, because Boeing and particularly Southwest didn't want to spend the money to recertify pilots on a "new" type of aircraft. So yes, it's pretty much a crude hack that wasn't needed for any objective reason other than to save some money for shareholders, and now people are dead.
- dataflow 3y ago
  You're quite mistaken AFAIK. > The failure mode was a multiple independent root cause sequence of low probability events. If I remember correctly there were about 200,000 flights before it was grounded after two airframe losses which is a failure rate of 1 in 100,000 flights [...] > preventing these types of problems "1 on 100,000" is not a "type of problem". Just because an event is rare that doesn't mean it's some kind of niche scenario that's hard to prevent. If you actually look at reports of what they did wrong (which you did not do at all), you see there were plenty of actions that went against safe engineering judgment. (And no, I'm not referring to mine or other randos', but those of actual engineers and pilots.) They blew past multiple safeguards in the process, which made unlucky events fatal. It didn't need to be that way, and it wasn't that way for other planes either.