All your controls are belong to us
 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060722...ermanyeuunrest

Terrorists (and pilots) beware, coming to a plane near you; remote controls!

Love or hate the idea it's a logical move, It also could have saved the recent Greek tragedy, possibly

Altervatively terrorists will in the future target the stations capapble of remote controlling the planes ;)

CBs (or equipment pulls in the EE bay) would be the easy answer to both situations.

Well i hope and i'm probably sure that the remote control centre is fully secure with armed guards. But what happens if the computers go wrong like the glitches we had in nats, that's what i would worry about.

I mean i'd rather be flying in a normal aircraft. i don't think the terrorists will stand a chance in bringing a plane down anymore, we have passengers to stop the terrorists now and air marshals in usa.

Would think Air Marshalls are pretty common all over the world (well, the civilised parts) now.

Quite frankly I think the idea complete bollocks and a total waste of cash. If I get this right, some Euroneddy is going to piss away €30M of our money to plan to build an overide to the controls of my aircraft? So I can't turn it off? And what controls will they be able to use? So where will they crash us or will there be a nice soft landing somewhere? And you are going to tell me that it won't go wrong? I'll never find that, by accident, ATC have taken control of my aircraft? Well, put the w:mad:ers who are planning this, together with a goodly proportion of MEPs and all the Commissioners in a Airbus 380 and let's test it on them. After all, it can't possibly fail, can it?

And of course, nobody would ever enter the ATC centre and take over ALL of the aircraft in range, would they?

Crackpots who come up with ideas like this should be operated on to stop them breeding.

PM

PM - surely the guillotine would achieve the same result - and probably more cheaply:)

or just jam the signals.

Sounds like a PR stunt. What's to stop someone in the company that developed the software leaking it and terrorists getting their hands on it?

. . . . and then we'd have the ideal terrorist set-up, when the terrorists don't even have to be on the flight, and lose their sorry @sses when the flight is flown into the ground.

A radio link is hardly an ideal "secure network" - and if they can hack into "secure" US Government computers . . . .

Why and how do we manage to elect idiots that come up with these ideas?

narrow-minded
 

This seems to me to be a very narrow-minded solution to the terrorist threat. A 'solution' that I think will lead to more loss of life rather than less.

My view is that terrorists simply want to make a point. The means to their ends has variously involved hijacking airliners and diverting them, right up to flying them into buildings and/or blowing them up.

I think that given autonomous ground control from authorities, in lieu of terrorists being able to hijack and divert, the terrorists will be more inclined towards blowing them up outright; especially considering communication difficulties between themselves and the ground controllers should the authorities be willing to grant/control a safe diversion as appeasement.

This will unnessicarily endanger passengers and crew of hijacked airplanes especially considering there seem to be plenty of safeguards against 'unaccountered for' airplanes approaching metros (read countless reports of airplanes being escorted away from cities by jet fighters).

By the time anyone got a commitee together, formulated a plan and decided as to whether it would be advisable to input left/right rudder, up/down elevator, left/right aileron, increase/decrease power the damn thing would have run out of fuel.

Recently, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement drone was on survelience along the southern border of Arizona, and was being 'controlled' from a station in Sierra Vista, when the operators computer screen 'froze'.
The back up plan was to immediately transfer to another computer terminal to regain control.
A checklist was in place to "assure" that the transfer was done in an orderly manner.
However, on this one occasion, the checklist was not followed, and when control was transferred, it was found that the HP fuel valve to the engine was selected to the closed position.

The resulting landing (otherwise known as a crash) was certainly nothing to write home about.:} :}

The drones I have been associated with are programmed to fly to a predetermined lat/long and 'land' when they lose contact with the controller.

By 'land', I mean that it descends to a low altitude over the spot and deploys a parachute. The parachute is attached at a point that holds the drone in a level attitude, and allows the onboard nav system to continue to 'fly' the aircraft, at very low power settings, to the actual landing spot, 'spot on'.

Works good!

Cheers, FD :ok: