3 ms·

I think it's the same thing as intelligence (in the national security sense). You can do lots of things to prevent outsiders from getting in, but if the inside

I think it's the same thing as intelligence (in the national security sense). You can do lots of things to prevent outsiders from getting in, but if the insiders want to circumvent the protections, they can. Someone has to have "root" access, when you can't trust that person, you are done. About the only thing I could think of is some way for people to report a problem like this and air traffic controllers on the ground having a way to take over control of the plane from people inside the plane. But that too could have problems (what if the air traffic controller on the ground is the murderous one, and now he is crashing planes that the pilot can't control). I think it's a near impossible problem to fully solve. The closest thing I can think of is positive train control (PTC) which sets safe boundaries and overrides the operator if the train exceeds those boundaries. In this case maybe the plane simply can not be flown into the airspace around the Alps no matter how much the pilot wants to.

erglkjahlkh 12y ago
Been there done that. The entourage I was in (30 people going to enjoy the woods) was once stopped in airport for carrying knives. Hell yeah we did, everyone did, the longest one was 40 cm long and all were carried visibly. We just told the guards to sod off as we had our own private transport plane we were waiting for. Who on earth would hijack their own plane? Especially as there were 30 armed people on board? That's the safest way to travel!
timoth 12y ago
Rather than ATC taking over the plane, which seems like a non-trivial exercise, it might be a lot easier to allow them to override the door 'lock' mode in the cockpit (which ignores the keypad code for door entry) so that in this case the pilot/others outside could have asked ATC for it and got in. This means that there isn't someone outside the cockpit on the plane who has 'root' access (so nobody can be threatened for it). Even then, there are considerations like not allowing the cockpit to kill all com links / power so that people outside the cockpit are still able to communicate with the ground to get the root pwd, and as mentioned elsewhere the person inside the cockpit could change their strategy to make recovery of control difficult or impossible even in this case (EDIT: e.g. throwing the plane about). Also, you'd probably want >1 ATC person to authorise to reduce the chance of the door being unlocked by someone at ATC in cahoots with hijackers.

erglkjahlkh 12y ago

Been there done that. The entourage I was in (30 people going to enjoy the woods) was once stopped in airport for carrying knives. Hell yeah we did, everyone did, the longest one was 40 cm long and all were carried visibly. We just told the guards to sod off as we had our own private transport plane we were waiting for. Who on earth would hijack their own plane? Especially as there were 30 armed people on board? That's the safest way to travel!

timoth 12y ago

Rather than ATC taking over the plane, which seems like a non-trivial exercise, it might be a lot easier to allow them to override the door 'lock' mode in the cockpit (which ignores the keypad code for door entry) so that in this case the pilot/others outside could have asked ATC for it and got in. This means that there isn't someone outside the cockpit on the plane who has 'root' access (so nobody can be threatened for it). Even then, there are considerations like not allowing the cockpit to kill all com links / power so that people outside the cockpit are still able to communicate with the ground to get the root pwd, and as mentioned elsewhere the person inside the cockpit could change their strategy to make recovery of control difficult or impossible even in this case (EDIT: e.g. throwing the plane about). Also, you'd probably want >1 ATC person to authorise to reduce the chance of the door being unlocked by someone at ATC in cahoots with hijackers.