Contact Lost with Planes One by One as FAA Fire Spread | Hacker News Reader

Contact Lost with Planes One by One as FAA Fire Spread

bloomberg.com

138 pointsforrest_t51 comments

Nobody is talking about the key issue: In the US they have been intentionally consolidating ATCs[0] for the last thirty years as a cost saving measure, and there is more consolidation yet to come.

I linked an article at [0] titled "House Subcommittee Challenges ATC Consolidation Efforts" and you're likely assuming that the House is trying to block consolidation, but the truth is exactly the opposite: in 2012 the FAA were trying to stop/slow the consolidation and the House were pushing it through, the "challenge" is that the FAA wasn't going fast enough!

Yet the mainstream media aren't discussing this at all...

It is very easy to blame a single disgruntled employee for all the disruption but consider how many other things could cause a single ATC location to go black (e.g. bombing, aircrash, natural distaster, accidental fire, extreme power surge, etc).

Yet the consolidations will no doubt continue, and instead of them looking at the root cause of this issue (that too much sky is controlled from a single location) they will blame the employee and move on like nothing happened.

This incident was far more serious than the recent White House break-in, but yet heads are rolling for the White House thing while absolutely nothing is being asked about this one!

[0]http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/ainsafety/2012-06-04/...

Air traffic control in the US should continue to be consolidated, but with the ability to control the entire US airspace from any one control center. Redundant fiber, servers, RF gear, all that jazz (ADS-B/NextGen is going to make this much easier, as well as Iridium now deploying ADS-B receivers on their new satellites deployed).

Disclaimer: Private pilot, have sat with several controllers for ~4 hours at ZAU during an open house while they moved traffic.

the ability to control the entire US airspace from any one control center

Hmm, if things are so bad that multiple regional centers are offline then it might be time to ground everything temporarily - I suppose this is what you're driving at, but I also imagine an unlikely-but-possible scenario where someone subverts an ATC, locks everyone else out, and then wreaks havoc.

Agreed. The amazing thing about this outage is that there's not a failover to accommodate a complete loss of at least one major ATC office.

Time to bring in the Chaos Monkey.

Interesting points. This is the source for the quotes in the article you linked to: http://archives.republicans.transportation.house.gov/Media/f...

I get the impression that this issue is particularly controversial in the US, going back to the air-traffic controllers strike of 1981, which was a political watershed for the Reagan administration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contro...

Relevant here is a recent Economist article on the decentralized approach that is slowly being adopted in European airspace: http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21615069-...

honestly as tech progresses why should this not be expected or desired? automation will move into this industry in time and one would expect human intervention may only come for emergencies and handling small craft landing at smaller airfields.

It's not about technology, it's about redundancy. If you have two data centers, and you consolidate them into one data center, you've just increased your exposure to risk by orders of magnitude.

This depends on what type of failover you have though. If you 1000 small data centers and you consolidate into 100 larger data centers this doesn't mean an order of magnitude increase in risk. As long as any data center can take over for any other data center you probably don't need more than a handful of data centers for redundancy (you might want them for other reasons though).

What you described is not redundancy. In your situation if 1 of the 2 data centers went down you would still have a blackout somewhere. In a truly redundant setup the load would be shifted to the redundant center with minimal interruption to the customer (airspace).

Pretty much.

A single PoP failure should not shatter the entire system.

What's PoP?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_presence

Point of Presence, I believe.

No no, the key issue here is Howard's ant-american sentiment, going by the article. If there weren't so many people who hated freedom it wouldn't be necessary to build systems to not have a single point of failure.

Something about how failing autocratic nations don't invest in critical infrastructure, and every mishap is blamed on a "spy" or a "traitor".

Really? I am not going to comment on the first sentence, but how I am going to say that it is pretty hard not to blame this on Howard. While it should have been much harder for one person to do all of this, it certainly is still his fault.

> The full Facebook post, obtained by Bloomberg, contained an anti-U.S. rant calling the government guilty of “immoral and unethical acts.”

Is it necessarily anti-U.S. to accuse the government of immoral and unethical acts? Surely most of us would agree that the government is guilty of immoral and unethical acts, although political leanings might have us point at different specific acts.

It is concerning that, yet again, we see criticism of the government equated with being "anti-U.S." or somehow traitorous (even if in this case the actions arguably were).

It's possible they meant that the rant was anti-U.S. and contained those allegations and not that the rant was anti-U.S. because of those allegations.

Yes, the wording is troubling, though it's hard to contest it without being able to read it myself. Is there an unedited copy of his post anywhere online yet?

http://imgur.com/wClCcYy

http://pastebin.com/A08VsdDs

So I'm gonna smoke this blunt and move on

If I was his defence lawyer I'd try to play it off like a big stoned misunderstanding. Whoops dropped my blunt into the server room!

Funny. I observed the same, yet my post above is at -39. Assume I touched a nerve. Don't criticise the government on HN, it won't win you friends.

"The attack was thorough and carried out by someone who knew the system intimately -- down to removing steel sheathing on data cables to destroy them, according to three people with knowledge of the incident."

They need a Two-Man Policy/No Lone Zone. We used that system in the Air Force and it was completely effective.

NSA too: "NSA Implementing 'Two-Person' Rule To Stop The Next Edward Snowden" http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/18/nsa-dir...

How well do two men policies work in practice? I'm currently reading "Command and Control" and I get the impression that even around nuclear warheads, people enjoy bending the rules if it will save them 15 minutes.

I'm not finished with the book, however.

I was involved with nuclear warheads in the USAF, and the Two-Man Policy was never compromised. We took it seriously and the penalties were severe. But that was the Cold War; things may have changed since. Much of it was built into the system. It took two keys to open anything, and the whole shop was divided into A locks and B locks. You were one or the other, never both. There was no practical way to open anything alone, including the maintenance bays.

Cold-war vet here too. My supervisor was on a two-man team, charged with moving COMSEC material. He and the other NCO took this very seriously, each of them keeping a hand on the sealed container. They'd get someone from base motorpool to drive them around in a van, since the leadership didn't want either of the couriers to be the driver (one of them would have had to let go of the container, and would have been out of sight of the other as they went around to the driver's seat), and the leadership didn't want anyone who had regular contact with either of them to be the driver either (I couldn't have done it, for example).

When I read about what's been happening with the missile crews and the B-52 aircrew not knowing they had a white one on board (and then leaving it parked unguarded overnight) -- that's really concerning. In the days of SAC, there would have been a new commanding officer in place by the end of the day. The current command system for controlling the weapons is too fragmented, and it seems to be regarded as "business as usual". Complacency is not something you want around these things.

You're telling me that a dedicated attacker couldn't kill or otherwise subdue an unwitting partner? This man tried to kill himself. Surely he wouldn't mind killing another to achieve his goals.

I think there's a huge difference between taking your own life and taking someone else's (although I don't have experience with either). In cases like this where someone is planning a spectacular suicide this type of partner system could help quite a bit.

It may not help stop dedicated attackers to have "no alone" zones, but I do imagine it'll make it more difficult for them to succeed.

Taking out a facility like ZAU could easily lead to loss of life, albeit in a detached way. I can't imagine he didn't desire a similar outcome given the context by which he committed the act. Doing the wetwork on a person you work with is probably another matter entirely.

Killing someone you know with your own hands is much more difficult than causing the death of unknown people.

"Hey Bob, come here I have a secret to tell you..." Stab and proceed with mission.

Seems simple enough.

I'm curious - is it effective because having another person there discourages these types of attacks, or that having another person there means that they can actively intervene in the event of something like this happening?

What is the probability of one person wanting to do damage? Square that.

Now consider that even if two people wanted to do damage, each might not know and trust the other to allow them.

> What is the probability of one person wanting to do damage? Square that.

What's the probability of one person wanting to do damage and having a momentary opportunity to smack the other person in the head with a hammer? Substantially more doable.

But you've now significantly dropped your original odds because your person who wants to do damage now has to be willing and capable of serious violence.

Those systems are set up so that responsibilities are split; one person alone doesn't have the knowledge to knock everything out.

That would be difficult to implement in this case. How are you going to un-teach one of the team members that fire near computers is bad?

Separate rooms with separate access control for redundant systems. Preferably made so fire from one room does not spread to the next.

I think that's a different concept to the “Two-Man Policy/No Lone Zone” mentioned above.

Both.

It was only effective because suicidal people hell bent on destruction are very rare.

"Minutes before the attack, Howard posted a message on Facebook saying he was 'about to take out ZAU and my life,' using the FAA’s three-letter call sign for the center, according to the FBI agent. The full Facebook post, obtained by Bloomberg, contained an anti-U.S. rant calling the government guilty of 'immoral and unethical acts.'"

More evidence that it is literally impossible for the US media to 'suspect' a White non-Muslim to be a terrorist.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-26/man-charged-with-se...

"'WAKE UP!' said the message to those authorized to read what’s been identified as Howard’s Facebook page. “This is a gov’t by the people, for the people and of the people which right now equates to immoral and unethical acts. That’s why terrorists and 3rd world nations hate us, because our tax dollars go to more unrest than rest.'

"'So we deserve the retribution from people who do not have the same ability for education, work and way of life,' the writer said.

"'Take a hard look in the mirror, I have,' the poster continued in a portion of the message quoted by the FBI. 'And this is why I am about to take out ZAU and my life.'"

What a terrible thing to say. How can the actions of a state be immoral? The state defines morality, and is therefore always in the right. This guy is clearly insane.

God bless America.

> The attacker also knew the system’s multiple backups and was able to damage or destroy those key links in a short period of time

Then they aren't very good "backups", i.e., they are too close to eachother.

They both serve the same building, so they kind of have to be close together.

They could easily be in separate rooms, in separate parts of the building. That seems like a minimum precaution. What if there was a normal fire? What about a normal power outage? What about a normal sprinkler system discharge?

It doesn't take a lunatic to disable 2 server racks in the same room.

Also from the article it says water damage to equipment which made it sound like they didn't have inert gas fire suppression systems installed (or that it couldn't handle the fire).

I wish the article had a bit more technical details about the failover system used.

What's interesting is, although nowhere near useful enough to organize rapid aircraft landing, one could purchase a cheap ($10) Software Defined Radio and use something like Dump1090[1] to view all local planes.

I imagine they still had some sort of capability close to this while their machines were 'offline'.

[1] https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090

Not all planes broadcast ads-b.

I might be wrong, but I believe most passenger airlines currently have it onboard.

It's supposedly required to be on board in the very near future.

There's a schedule for making it mandatory by 2020 in the US. Since last year in Australia every aircraft flying over 29,000ft must have one fitted.

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