A Recipe for Total Disaster

Well, that didn't take long. Yesterday European authorities determined that the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 was depressed and responded by locking out the pilot and crashing his aircraft into a mountain.

Today we have people making suggestions like this:

With the news that the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, apparently brought down the plane deliberately, killing all 150 on board, we should quickly develop procedures and install equipment to allow air traffic control officials to override cabin cockpit controls. They could then take over a troubled flight — whether from an incapacitated crew or someone bent on malevolence — and fly the plane to safety, much in the way that drones are routinely operated.

This is, to put it mildly, a colossally stupid idea. Every day we hear more stories about hackers getting into bank computers, cash registers for major retailers, email accounts for major corporations, and nuclear power plants.

When you write code you either do it fast or you do it right.

Now they want to quickly place the thousands of airplanes flying through our skies at the mercy of hackers. As every software engineer knows, when you write code you either do it fast or you do it right. Mucking around with code that operates the flight controls of an aircraft and exposing them to external influence will introduce thousands of unintentional security vulnerabilities, especially if we rush to do so.

There are tens of thousands of flights per day. Terrorists could kill a hundred thousand people in a single day if they discovered a security hole in the remote control code for the Airbus 320. After 9/11 the airline industry was screwed up for years. If terrorists crashed 100 planes simultaneously the airline industry would never recover.

And even if the remote control code was 100% bulletproof, what if an unbalanced person or a group of terrorists or took over the remote control center itself?

In any case, remote control would be trivial to circumvent: would-be hijackers or suicidal pilots could simply jam radio signals on the plane. For decades the FAA has been afraid that cell phones, MP3 players and laptops would interfere with avionics, which is why we always had to turn them off during vulnerable times like takeoff and landing. Devices that intentionally jam radio signals could easily be smuggled aboard planes in the guise of those very same laptops, cell phones and MP3 players, rendering any form of remote control impossible.

There is no technological fix for a human problem

The reality is, there is no magic technological fix for what is essentially a human problem. All of our security ultimately relies on trusting human beings to do their jobs. Even the most popular idea, requiring two pilots in the cockpit at all times, isn't foolproof: it assumes that the pilot and copilot would never conspire in a suicide pact.

It also assumes that a pilot can't get a gun or knife aboard a plane and would never shoot or slit the throat of the other pilot. This is a foolish assumption, because it's ridiculously easy for airline employees to smuggle weapons onto airplanes, as we witnessed last year when Delta employees at the Atlanta airport smuggled hundreds of guns to New York aboard airplanes.

We also allow sky marshals to carry firearms on airplanes, and it would be trivial for them to shoot the pilots when the cockpit door is open. Given the recent spate of scandals at the Secret Service, I can't imagine the sky marshal service is any more rigorous in its screening of its employees, so there are without a doubt a few bad eggs there as well.

It looks like at least three airline pilots (on Egypt Air, Malaysian Airlines and Germanwings flights) have committed suicide by plane since 1999, despite rigorous psychological screening.

People need to stop running around screaming it's the end of the world and just accept the fact that it's impossible to be 100% safe. After all, there are 200 million idiots out on the highways, and you're far several thousand more times likely to be killed on the road by some drunken dolt on a Friday night than by a terrorist or suicidal pilot crashing a plane.

Yes, we need to take reasonable precautions, but in the heat of the moment we must not get sidetracked with stupid unworkable ideas in our attempt to pander to chicken littles who think the sky is falling, and avoid doing things that will only make us less safe.