(Newswire.net — April 16, 2015) — After the Germanwings flight that crashed in the Alps last month, German aviation authorities urged aviation technology companies to improve the security of airplanes. The idea presented was to implement remote flying technology like that used for military drones. In case of the emergency, control over the airplane could be overridden from the ground to land the aircraft safely.
“We have to think past today’s technology,” Klaus Dieter Scheurle, head of the Deutsche Flugsicherung air traffic control authority said at a press conference on Wednesday. He urged the aviation industry to develop a reliable remote control system for commercial aircraft.
“Such an event might cause us to reconsider systems which would allow the control of aircraft to be taken over by personnel on the ground in emergency situations,” Scheurle said. He added that a modern airplane can land by itself and be pre-programmed self navigate. A remote safe landing override command also should be considered.
“There should be no ban on thinking about how to handle a plane in an emergency when the people on board cannot help,” Scheurle said.
However, a new remote flying technology could potentially become another weak point with the possibility of remote hijacking of the airplane. In December 2011, Iran hacked the CIA’s latest technology stealth drone and brought it down with not much more than computer navigating knowledge.
The idea of emergency remote controlling the commercial airplanes has been widely judged by aviation experts and pilot associations. This week, the US Government Accountability Office warned that modern commercial aircraft packed with electronics are already vulnerable to sabotage through hacking, even without such a full-fledged remote control system.
“Modern communications technologies, including IP connectivity, are increasingly used in aircraft systems, creating the possibility that unauthorized individuals might access and compromise aircraft avionics systems,” GAO said in its report, quoting cyber security and aviation experts.
The report doesn’t provide any specifics on how exactly the hacking and taking over could be done, however it hints that the person would have to get through the firewalls that divide the aircraft’s flight control and entertainment systems.
“Firewalls are software components, they could be hacked like any other software and circumvented,” the report cited experts as saying.
The report concludes that FAA needs to work on certification of aircraft avionics that will account for these vulnerabilities and remove them as possible threats to commercial aviation.
In response, Keith Washington, acting assistant secretary for administration with the FAA, stated the agency “recognizes that cyber-based threats to federal information systems are becoming a more significant risk and are rapidly evolving and increasingly difficult to detect and defend against. We take this risk very seriously.”
Boeing and Airbus also reacted to the GAO’s report, saying that the jets “have more than one navigational system available to pilots,” and then “no changes to the flight plans loaded into the airplane systems can take place without pilot review and approval.”
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