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Comment by jamesseattle | Hacker News Reader

I concur.

I used to work on interfaces to all the computers on the latest 747 and the 787 and there is no wireless way to talk to any of the computers or sensors that have any input to controlling the airplane.

I am not making this up.

On the 747-400 I was on a group whose computer got input from all the 70+ computers on the airplane. It was all wired.

On the 787 I worked on a database during the development of the airplane that tracked all the information that flowed between computers. Nothing came to any computer that controlled the airplane that was not by wire or fiber optics.

I also dealt with ACARS. It is a read-only system on the airplane. It gets information from other computers and transmits it via satellite to the ground.

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But do any of those 70+ computers receive RF input? Are there any RF receivers anywhere on the same wired network--or is all RF reception air-gapped from flight control?

(I'm not trying to imply anything, just curious.)

"I used to work on interfaces to all the computers on the latest 747 and the 787 and there is no wireless way to talk to any of the computers or sensors that have any input to controlling the airplane."

Don't they get weather data from somewhere? And if the pilot thought there was a thunderstorm or heavy turbulence in some direction, wouldn't they fly the plane through what appeared to be the clearest route on their own? (And does the autopilot not take weather into account?)

"Don't they get weather data from somewhere?"

Yes, most (if not all) modern airliners have a radar dish in the nose of the aircraft. If you wanted to mess with this, you'd have to spoof radar echoes. Not something you can do from an android phone for sure.

"And does the autopilot not take weather into account?"

No, not in the slightest. Pilots adjust autopilot settings to account for weather. It is not automatic.

I believe the weather information comes from both an on board doppler radar and ACARS. ACARS is basically text messaging for airplanes over VHF.

i believe you only dealt with the intended usage of the APIs and interfaces?

this may be the same as someone that sets up a SCADA to the local city water&power and believe the intranet is isolated, until a month later another contract requires for a public server in the office and they just connect the entire thing to the internet.

The main difference being that the FAA would never let such an "upgrade" happen on any consumer airplane.

you would be surprised.

i can't vouche for FAA, but hospital equipment manufacturer have even stricter regulation and there i can vouche for way worse 'upgrades'.

Let me add to the surprise. I once wrote a nice piece of software that controlled hospital equipment (automated blood coagulation analyzer, to be precise). It is a quite serious piece of equipment used for post-operation patient recovery. As far as I know, a well regulated area.

Equipment went through stringent certification, passed all tests, deployed in hospitals, etc. All well and good, right? Did I mention, that I was 13, when I wrote that piece of software ;) And I guess you can imagine the quality of that code :)

The experienced outsourced QA team in India guarantees your code works properly.

Well, to tell the truth, that story has happened almost twenty years back, before outsourcing really kicked in. Equipment was developed in Russia, for Russian market. And I also had some five years of playing with C/x86 asm, by the time I was 13.

So no, it actually was not that bad. No kids were harmed, and no QA teams in India were involved.

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