Hacks, Planes and System Transformation

Driving home from work last night, I listened to a story on NPR that was more than a little disconcerting, especially for someone like me who’s not crazy about flying in machines that contain six million parts and 171 miles of wiring and have wings that weigh 95,000 pounds each. The report, entitled “Could the new air traffic control system be hacked?,” was about how easy it is, apparently, to hack into a new, billion-dollar air traffic control system that’s being phased in over the next eight years.

The future?

The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), which relies on GPS instead of radar, is supposed to make it possible for air traffic controllers and pilots to pack more planes, helicopters and drones into our skies. (Makes me think of the crowded skies of The Fifth Element, the 1997 sci-fi movie with Willis and Jovovich.)

That’s just what we need, isn’t it? More planes and drones.

Our current radar-based system is slow, inaccurate and overwhelmed, the report said, with radar ground systems that require lots of space and are expensive to maintain. By 2020, planes will all be equipped with GPS and will be required to use NextGen’s new automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system to enter crowded American airspace.

It turns out that ADS-B signals look like computer code. But, the story says, “unlike traffic on the Internet, these signals are unencrypted and unauthenticated.” This means computer nerds who know their way around a CPU can penetrate the system and create fake “ghost planes” in the sky, confusing air traffic controllers and causing more than a little chaos.

Believe it or not, one computer geek, a guy named Brad “RenderMan” Haines, gave a talk at a conference in Las Vegas in which he explained exactly how to do this – complete with a slide presentation. You know, I’ve been to lots of conferences and the most interesting thing I can remember viewing is a registration table collapsing and spilling name tags all over the nondescript carpet.

Collision course with history?

Hackers aren’t the only ones talking about NextGen. Last year, some Air Force bigwig who studies cyberwarfare said this system may put us "on a collision course with history." Not sure what that means but it sounds ominous, doesn’t it?

It makes sense in this day and age to make the conversion from a ground-based to a satellite-based system, although I don’t understand how putting more aircraft into the air will save fuel and reduce gridlock, as proponents claim. (The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates and oversees all aspects of civil aviation in this country, estimates that NextGen will reduce aviation fuel consumption by 1.4 billion gallons by 2018. Also, in-flight movies will be better, flight attendants will be more attractive and less irritable, and select overhead compartments on domestic flights will contain free jewels and lottery tickets.)

When NextGen’s vulnerabilities first came to light, the FAA released a one-paragraph statement that said in part: "An FAA ADS-B security action plan identified and mitigated risks and monitors the progress of corrective action. These risks are security sensitive and are not publicly available." Why government bureaucrats are always accused of using doublespeak and gobbledygook is beyond me.

To my consternation, I wasn’t able to Google a definitive answer to the question, “Who’s paying for NextGen?” before my bedtime last night but if airline passenger taxes and congressional appropriations are part of the mix, and I assume they are, then the answer is “We are.” It’s therefore particularly irksome that public safety is evidently not a Tier One concern of those who’re calling the billion-dollar shots here. (It’s not like the idea of undertaking a massive transformation of our nation’s air traffic control system just popped up a few months ago.)

The NPR story concluded by pointing out that people want the FAA “to be more transparent about how it's testing a multibillion-dollar system the public will soon rely on to keep it safe in the air.”

I’m taking the train.


Sources: National Public Radio, Boeing, Federal Aviation Administration.