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Comment by jheriko | Hacker News Reader

"What would be really useful would be a way for controllers on the ground (not ATCs) or in chase planes to assume control of airliners performing erratically, not responding to calls from ATC, air defense fighters, or their corporate offices. THAT could have averted the Germanwings crash and the 9/11 collisions without the need for highly classified hardware in every airliner."

this comment really resonated with me. we have the tech for this right now, we had it 10 years ago too... remote piloting drones is now a completely day-to-day occurance. you could argue we had it down "well enough" in the 80s even

someone somewhere should be pushing for this. i'd never thought of it before, but now i've seen this comment i'm wondering why we don't have this sort of thing. especially in light of 9/11...

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That (remote control of civilian aircraft) would be such a rich target for hackers. I would much rather see the civilian aerospace industry implement carefully audited, carefully deployed autonomy (starting with partial autonomy), rather than remote control.

Civilian aerospace does not have the security focus that the military has. Even if you solve the security problem from airplane black-box controller all the way to the remote control cockpit, and even if you find civilian pilots willing to fly planes when a remote pilot can override them at any time... there are there costs of satellite communications, costs of designing and installing black-box remote controls on dozens, even hundreds of types of commercial aircraft, and costs of staffing remote control cockpits with pilots who can fly every type of commercial plane, 24/7.

What happens if it's insecure and allows a bad actor to take control of planes?

You could crash a plane into the ground and nobody on board could do a thing about it.

You could crash every plane into the ground at once.

Maybe that's preventable by more automated safety systems that override if you're going to crash, but there are other equally bad options and I doubt we could block them all. Flying planes out over the ocean until fuel runs out, for instance.

Yeah, this wouldn't work. You've now just increased hi-jackers attack surface from "being on the plane" to "anywhere in the entire world" ... very, very dangerous.

Speaking as someone with a good view on aerospace code, I think the issue is that the difficulty of combining the kind of code required for remote control of an aircraft with the kind of regulation, failsafes and standards of commercial airliner code is what is holding us back.

Writing UAS software is hard. Only operating UAS in warzones helps with the overheads for this. Effectively "drone-ifying" a commercial airliner is a complete nightmare which would probably require government assistance to implement in the form of cutting of red tape or funding the handling of existing red tape.

That could work for situations where the pilots are unconscious (like Helios Flight 522), but wouldn't work for the malicious pilot cases you cited, since a malicious pilot could simply disable the remote control system by turning off the corresponding circuit breakers.

You'd need to make sure the prefix code was secure.

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