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09/19/2001 Entry: "Terrorism as a Design Flaw"
It's about time someone starts to question why it was possible to fly a plane straight into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.
It should be considered an engineering design flaw that this sort of flight path was allowed in the first place.
Instead of focusing solely on keeping terrorists off planes, we should also be looking at fixing the air traffic control system so that planes cannot be used as missiles again. Below are an off-the-cuff possible approach I came up with on the drive home from work today that might be useful for at least considering the possibility.
- I assuming the plane already has access to a GPS and/or can track where it currently is based on the data it's getting from its sensors. I'm also assuming this data can't be changed from the cockpit: The pilot shouldn't be able to reprogram the plane to think it's near Philadelphia when it's actually near Paris.
- The plane should know where it's going, and this data should be stored somewhere independent of the cockpit. This data should be stored into the airplane's databases by the air traffic control system using suitable strong encryption. The encryption should at lease be strong enough so it couldn't be cracked in less than two days. This destination data will be used to determine the degree of artificial feedback to provide to the pilot when the plane drifts off course.
- The plane should also contain a database of possible targets, such as cities, power plants, dams, historical areas etc. Since the database is potentially huge, the air traffic control system transmit items in the planes range as the aircraft moved from sector to sector across the countryside. This list of targets will be used in while generating artificial feedback.
- The plane should also contain a database of safe crash landing zones. Much like the targets, these zones could be transmitted in-flight. The idea here is to provide the plane with suitable good places to head towards when providing artificial feedback.
- By monitoring the plane's current location, and it's intended destination, "artificial feedback" can be sent back to the pilot. This could be provided in the form of a tendency for the plane to veer towards it's intended target. Steer the plane too much off course, and the plane would introduce some fluctuations in the pilot's chosen flight path, in effect introducing turbulence, which could act as a form of in-flight rumble strip. This should be enough to waken a dozing pilot, and alert passengers that something is going wrong.
- The artificial turbulence would get worse as the plane continued veering off course. Once it passed a certain threshold, the plane would cut off cockpit control, look at it's list of suitable crash landing zones, and crash land the plane in autopilot. Or possibily pass cockpit control to someone pn ground who could control the plane remotely.
- Likewise if the plane sensed that it was approaching one of the possible targets, it would also introduce artificial feedback into the pilots intended flight path, in effect forcing the plane away from the possible targets. The closer the plane got to the target, the stronger the introduced feedback would be, steering the plane away from the target more violently as the plane as the risk of collision increased.
- Again, after a certain period of being forced towards a target, the cockpit would be cutoff, and the plane would go into automatic crash land mode, or remote control mode.
- Air Traffic control could provide a new destination in flight, but it would have to provide the keys necessary to "unlock" the current destination loaded in the plane using some suitable strong encryption algortithm for authorization.
- Any unauthorized tampering with the databases discussed above, or the planes GPS system, would force the plane to go into autopilot or remote control mode.
Hopefully this is enough to show that some technological changes in air traffic control and plane design could be implemented that could cut down on the "missle plane" design flaw. Please keep this in mind when you hear a politican tell you have to trade in your civil liberties for your safety. In many cases, it may be that you're giving up your freedom so that some technological bug won't have to be fixed. In other words, someone's profits are being put ahead of your rights. Don't let this happen. Eternal vigilance blah blah blah. Et cetera, et cetera.
Engineers in general should consider the ways their products could be misused by terrorists, and consider these design flaws, and then go to work fixing them. If you uncover such a flaw in a product you're working on, and your employeer is unwilling to incur the cost of fixing it, consider blowing the whistle on the project. At the very least place an anonymous call into the anti-terrorist 1-800 numbers I'm sure are being put in place at this very moment.
