Pentagon Wants Kill Switch For Planes

mytrip writes "The Pentagon's non-lethal weapons division is looking for technologies that could 'disable' aircraft, before they can take off from a runway — or block the planes from flying over a given city or stretch of land. The Directorate's program managers don't mention how engineers might pull off such a kill switch. But, however it's done, they'd like to have a similar system for boats, as well. They're looking for a device that can, from 100 meters away, 'safely stop or significantly impede the movement' of vessels up to 40 feet long, with 'minimal collateral damage.'"

You say: "Defense"...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I say: "Attack vector".

Block them from flying over cities?

[willyhill]

I believe that's called an "anti-aircraft missile" system, sometimes with the "shoulder-launched" feature for only $9.99 more.

How the hell do they intend to pull that off without collateral damage. Force fields? Giant shark balloons?

And how to prevent malicious usage?

[corsec67]

If they have something that can disable a plane, how do the prevent malicious usage?
And then how can you prevent that kill switch from being disabled?

Boats aren't that complex, especially if you have a diesel engine, where electricity is not required.
Airplanes could be made without that special "feature".

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[arminw]

Hey, they obviously left out cars and trains here. A way to disable all cars on all LA freeways might have same use. I don't know what, but I'm sure some hare-brain in government could figure out what that would be good for.

only law abiding citizens will be effected

[Original Replica]

I don't think drug runners or terrorists are going to be using DRMed boats or planes.

Given how often tasers are used as pain-forced compliance devices as opposed to an alternative to an actual deadly force situation, I don't think non-lethal disabling technologies do anything but provide the government with media friendly ways to suppress dissent.

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[Datamonstar]

What the hell do you need a missile for when you've got a passenger jet?

_Now_ how do people feel about Amtrak?

[smchris]

Which would you rather be in: a train where the locomotive has a kill switch or a jet that has a kill switch?

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[Anonymous Coward]

How in the world can you 'safely stop' and aircraft in flight?!

Re:How about deploying the chute?

[tomhudson]

Riiiight ... you've just lifted the wheels, and someone throws the kill switch. You "glide" back into the ground, with a full load of fuel, no power, no wheels, no control.

Re:And how to prevent malicious usage?

[zappepcs]

Better question that that is:

What the hell are they going to do with it? Once they are installed and there is no longer any use in trying to use a plane for terrorist activities and the terrorist turn to the much easier alternative that they already have ... uhhh who the fuck is going to pay for the kill switches? This OCD focus on air transport for anti-terrorism is a ploy as there is no reason to believe that there are MORE terrorists who WANT to use planes.

It's all a ruse to continue the 'war on terror' and the multibillion dollar boondoggle of the American populace. $4/gallon is nothing once we start paying for all these unnecessary anti-terrorism measure it will be up to $15/gallon or higher.

Actually the only word that I can think of for the focus on air transport is criminal. Nothing less is behind it.

As myself and many others will point out, there are PLENTY of other worthy methods of terrorism. Picking the most guarded of them is hardly filed under 'surprise attack' in the terrorist's field manual.

Back to basics here:

Where are the terrorists? Prove it!
What will they use to attack? Prove it!
Why won't they use other, simpler methods? Prove it!

If you can answer those three in support of beefing up air transport security I will quickly ask why you have not gone out and apprehended them already since you know who is guilty of what and why, and apparently have the fucking proof.

I'm so tired of these ineffective and inconvenient excuses for the government to steal my rights in the name of protecting me. Fuck off already. At the rate things are going, the next round of so called 'terrorists' will actually be citizens revolting against the protective measures.... arrgghhhh

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[COMON$]

Go figure the govt using a sledgehammer to polish a window. IT pros are used to these situations, rather than explain the problem and ask experts to find a solution they tell you the solution that their pea sized short sided brains can conceive.

Why not get a group of engineers together and say, come up with a contingent plan for hijackings. This would open the door to creative solutions other than kill switches.

Re:Minimal collatoral damage

[esocid]

Seems more reasonable now that I read the actual request. It mentions preventing aircraft from being taken off of the ground, but it doesn't go into much detail about when in flight and preventing aircraft from flying into no-fly zones, at least not from what I perceived, other than

Effects should be focused on the aircraft, not the pilot or other personnel on board

. But a little skepticism of the govt is always a healthy thing to have. I would still be wary of having some sort of device on board a plane I'm inside of, and that is one big malfunction that could occur.

Er, I think today's passengers will handle this

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

I distinctly remember that before the 911 attacks passengers were instructed to comply fully with hijackers. This was because it was thought that this would lessen the danger to passengers.

911 really blew the hijacker's wads, because there are no longer compliant airline passengers.

There will never be another hijacking unless the sole purpose is to crash the aircraft arbitrarily - in which case a kill switch wouldn't really hurt the hijacker's plans.

Re:only law abiding citizens will be effected

[morgan_greywolf]

They're not looking to install a remote-control "off" switch in your plane/boat/car. This is a proposal to develop a weapon that can stop a vehicle, rather than setting it ablaze with a missile.

which is a lot more difficult than it sounds. How do you cause a commercial jetliner, for instance, stop or divert in mid-flight without causing the plane to crash? Ever play Flight Simulator? A Boeing 747 doesn't exactly turn on a dime.

REMOTE CONTROL

[maz2331]

Sorry to shout in the title (not really) but isn't it just obvious that all commercial aircraft should be fitted with some way to take remote control?

All you need is a few cameras, some electronics, a computer, and a radio. It isn't rocket science.

As for small private boats and cars, this is a phenominally stupid idea. First, it won't work. Any asshat looking to use a boat to blow something up is going to get the cheapest one available... which means one built in the 1980's wwithout any electronic controls at all.

Or they will buy a new one and just retrofit the damn thing to work around a kill switch. Just slap an old V8 in there, or build their own electronic fuel injection control (almost trivially easy) and shield the hell out of it and the kill switch is dead itself.

For large commercial jets, making them remote-able isn't a problem, and the airlines would go along with it for just the liability protection alone. For personal vehicles, fuhgeddaboudit.

Re:Who'll pay for it and other problems

[Eskarel]

TBH I don't think they really care about fiberglass boats that are just hull, mast and sail.

You can't crash a boat like that into much of anything and do any serious damage(without a lot of explosives at least), you can't outrun a motor launch in one of those, and you're not likely to get in a situation where there's a lot of innocent people on one of them and they're not too hard to sink.

Here's a crazy thought ..

[Luscious868]

Here's a crazy thought .. instead of spending tens of billions to develop something like this (and billions more on other warsa nd weapons) why don't we remove our troops from the Middle East and stop meddling in their affairs to the point where we get thousands of people so pissed off at us they are willing to hijack planes and kill themselves to make their anger at us known. Just a thought ...

Re:No "Kill Switch"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually an entirely sensible thing to be researching. Currently, the only practical way to disable a flying aircraft under hostile control is to shoot it down, almost certainly killing everyone onboard. In the scenario where an aircraft is out of control or in hostile control, where the lives of the passengers are not expendable, a non-lethal weapon is very desirable indeed!

This will almost certainly not take the form of a 'kill-switch'. It will most likely be something like a low-level autopilot that diverts the plane, irrespective of control inputs, or something like a missile filled with sticky, drag-inducers that will cause the plane to come down quickly, but safely.

Inflammatory language like 'kill-switch' conjures paranoid visions of some bureaucraft bumping the wings-stay-on/wings-fall-off switch are simply not what is being sought.

Re:Something like

[plover]

When a plane gets hit with by the EMP it WILL go down.

Not at all. For example, my friend's Luscombe (made in 1947) does not have an electrical system. No lights, no radios, no wires. Spark is provided by a magneto system, which already harnesses large magnetic pulses to generate electricity. An EMP might suck the cast iron block in the direction of the magnet for a microsecond or two, perhaps cause a few poorly timed sparks to fire harmlessly in the presence of exhaust gas, twitch the dashboard compass, and make the iPod in his pocket go "poof", but other than that absolutely nothing else in the plane would even react.

Even in a regular general aviation plane with a real electrical system, all an EMP will do is fry the navigational and communications equipment. Unlike computer controlled fuel injectors, most small aircraft engines operate 100% mechanically. The control surfaces are all mechanical, except possibly for some "fancy options", such as an electrical trim system. But even then, electrical (non-electronic) equipment won't be damaged by an EMP.

EMP pulses break electronic things by inducing voltages high enough to destroy P-N junctions. They're not Star Wars tractor beams.

Re:Something like

[plover]

Oops, sorry, I mis-spoke above. An EMP will not destroy ALL the navigational equipment. It would only destroy the transistor-based electronic navigational equipment. Mechanically powered equipment, such as vacuum powered gyroscopes, turn and bank indicators, air speed and altimeters would all continue to work normally. And if your radios are old enough (tube-based) they'll continue to operate as well.

So if you're in the plane that's hit by the EMP, don't worry. It'll keep flying, and the pilot will still be able to navigate. He'll just have to use the mechanical instruments without relying on the fancy GPS and glass displays. Failure of the electronic systems, by the way, is a failure they practice in training and may be tested on.

Really, the only way an EMP would bring down a small plane is if the pilot had a pacemaker, and a pacemaker is pretty much going to get a pilot's medical certificate yanked anyway, so he'd no longer be flying.

Re:How about deploying the chute?

[Anonymous Coward]

For very large planes, you're quite right that it wouldn't work. I don't know if you can make a parachute big enough to support an airliner. For smaller planes, the devices are rocket deployed to get them out of the airstream, and the chutes are designed to arrest an out of control light plane.

Now, the plane will still be out of control on the chute--it's no longer steerable and will land somewhere random.

However, considering that an average light plane weighs less and has a carrying capacity far, far less than even a small SUV, anyone who wants to hijack one for terrorist use really needs a complimentary head examination. Not all that long after 9/11, an idiot kid under the influence of some of the prescription drugs we pump kids full of these days stole a fairly new Cessna 172 and rammed it full speed into a Tampa skyscraper. The result: besides killing himself, he broke a window (as in "a" window), destroyed a desk in the affected office, and of course made the media look stupid trying to draw parallels to 9/11 while saying dumbass things like wondering if the building was going to collapse. A little plywood and it was just fine.

Light planes make lousy terrorist weapons. Big planes are a potential problem, but this "solution" is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard of.

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[mrbluze]

it can always be called an "accident" due to a "mechanical failure"

They'd just call it that even if people saw a missile hit it and even if debris of the plane was strewn over an otherwise impossible distance.

Re:You say: Hijacking "Defense"...

[Phroggy]

The solution to aircraft hijackings has be listed in post hijacking reports since the 1960s. Strengthen the flight deck walls and door and keep the door locked. If this had been done 9/11 could never have happened. After all, if the Israeli airline could do it why couldn't everyone else.

Au contraire! Before 9/11 the hijackers simply would have said "unlock the door or we'll start killing hostages," and they would have unlocked the door. The assumption at the time was that if you make the hijackers think you're giving in to their demands, they'll land the plane safely and let the hostages go, and then you can try to capture the hijackers. The American people now understand that some hijackers want to use planes as weapons and are willing to die for their cause. Consequently, the threat of killing hostages no longer carries any weight.

Locked door or not, after 9/11 it is no longer possible to hijack a plane and fly it into a building.

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ignoring the fact that interfering with an airplane already in flight is almost guaranteed to go badly, we have this technology already.

Its called EMP, now a days just about everything is computerized, from cars and airplanes to your fucking toaster, the most important of these in this case would be the fact that most combustion engines now use a computer to dictate the firing timing on spark plugs, not to mention the fact that your gas pedal is probably more electronic than mechanical at this point as well.

Govt can't think outside the box

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen! Mark Twain said 'When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'. The stupid thing is they announce these hare-brained schemes without even realizing how dumb they sound. Our intellectual superiors should be tackling terrism at the roots, where future terrists are born, bred and indoctrinated. Instead these high-tech sort of solutions will cost $$$ and not give results. As Bruce says, all the terrists have to do is when planes get too hard blo up a shopping center or train which aren't well defended. They're assuming the terrists will use the exact same attack vector as they did last time.

And hey NSA: Why are you wasting time logging and reading my message? Why aren't you looking in the caves of North Pakistan for you-know-who? You guys get heaps of cash. Please spend it sensibly.

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Your thinkin' that Truman woulda authorised Little Boy and Fat Man on Bremen and Dusseldorf?

Re:You say: Hijacking "Defense"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds great until the pilot has a heart attack.

Re:You say: Hijacking "Defense"...

[Dhalka226]

what makes you so sure that it is NO longer possible?

You live in a post-9/11 world. You're on a plane. Somebody gets up, pulls out a box cutter and starts threatening passengers in an attempt to get the cockpit open. Do you:

1. Open the cockpit and let him fly the plane into a building, or
2. Jump the motherfucker along with half the other passengers on the plane?

That's why he and I are so sure that it won't happen again. Like he said, policy used to be "do whatever they say" because the assumption was they just wanted to get someplace and run off. The assumption now is "they're going to fly this plane into a building," whether that's right or wrong. I don't know about you, but I assume my chances of survival to be pretty low if my plane is flown into a building, so I'm going to jump the fucks even if I do risk being spliced up potentially to the point of death. Death sucks pretty much either way for me, but I like my own odds better trying to do something to stop it and I acknowledge that if I'm a goner either way the best case is for there to be as few other deaths as manageable.

For that matter, terrorists are not stupid. 9/11 was a pretty brilliant plot: they identified weak points in a part of our country, including policy for how to react to what they were about to do and the fact that we were basically not looking; they exploited these weak points, poor policy decisions and general naiveté of the populace; and they did so in a way that made people literally terrified to use something that days before had been ingrained in our culture. They won't that round big time.

Do you really believe round two is going to be done in the same manner? In a place we've fortified, changed our policies about and are watching to the point of unhealthy obsession? They're going to look for the NEXT target where they can exploit their way to success--and I'm sure there are many of them. If I had to pick a place I felt the MOST safe from a terrorist attack post 9/11, it would be on an airplane. Hell, I'd be more afraid in the lines at the security checkpoints. If I were a terrorist, I'd detonate my bomb there.

It's not an impossibility, no; few things are when dealing with predicting human behaviors. But it's almost certainly low enough risk now that we don't need to be focusing all our energy there--and should never have been to begin with.

Article is -1 Flamebait

[laddiebuck]

I wish we could at least mod articles. The Wired summary inserts the misleading phrase 'kill switch'. The Pentagon is merely looking for a method of disabling planes on the ground that isn't completely destructive and entail massive loss of life. Nothing remote going on here.

Re:Here's a crazy thought ..

[ari_j]

Do you really think that either (a) the people in the Middle East who hate the West do so only because there are Western troops in the Middle East or (b) removing those troops now will end that hatred?

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[darthflo]

Not to rain on your parade and you've certainly got your history right, but when something as scary as terrorism requires you to think back thirteen years to an event with 168 fatalities, this seems very damn ridiculous to me.
Just as a sad little comparison: On average, each and every 36-hour-period from 1994 through 2007 had more people die in traffic accidents [1] than this huge headline-making bomb. 9/11, OTOH, took almost four weeks to be offset by road fatalities (and caused four^Wseven years of all-out war against freedom (and the middle east)). Strange, eh?

[1] http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx [dot.gov]

Re:"Minimum Collateral Damage"...

[caluml]

Or have a big foot that comes down out of a cloud, and stamps the plane onto the ground. Wait, that's Python...

Re:You say: Hijacking "Defense"...

[Prof.Phreak]

But then we wouldn't have funny films like Airplane, where the passenger gets to fly an airplane.

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[Palshife]

Yep, I'd say your link unequivocally shows the lack of justification for linking Al-Qaeda to Iraq. Here's the list of locations of kill/capture from your link:

Pakistan
Iraq
Philipines
Iraq
Pakistan
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Thailand
Pakistan
Pakistan
United Arab Emirates
Yemen
Georgia
Pakistan
Pakistan
Afghanistan
Germany

Notice a pattern? I see two. Pakistan and not Iraq.

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[Hal_Porter]

It doesn't help their "organization" any that Osama bin Laden is hiding in a cave, or that we keep killing all their officers [globalsecurity.org] in that silly, unjustifiable war in Iraq...

"im in ur base, killin ur doodz", as it were.

Well yeah. But the the real problem seems to be the quality of people that volunteer in Europe.

E.g. Richard Reid trying to light Semtex with a cigarette lighter, or the guys that attacked Glasgow Airport and ended literally dieing in a fire but failing to kill a single other person. Someone said "these guys must have ridden the short bus to terrorist school". But they were NHS Doctors. Or the guys that did the 21st July bombings

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_July_2005_London_bombings [wikipedia.org]

The detonators worked but the main charge failed. Someone said "I saw an Asian gentleman with an exploded backpack looking very surprised".

Or these guys who bought a load of fertilizer with a traceable card. The guy that sold it guessed they were going to make a bomb and tipped off MI5 who already knew and were listening to everything they said or typed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6610000/newsid_6610700/6610737.stm?bw=nb&mp=rm [bbc.co.uk]

The thing is that a run of terrorist attacks all fail to kill any infidels and all the terrorists end up either dead or in jail and it is much harder to recruit more people willing to do suicide bombings.

Killing al Qaeda "number 2" leaders in Afghanistan is no bad thing to do, but the fact is that attacking the West requires that they can recruit people there who are not complete cretins. And they can't, or at least have failed to date. It's like they attract the sort of nutcases that would go postal and then kill themselves and these people are not up to the sort of planning and preparation that terrorism requires.

People start to make jokes about them being incompetent too, and that probably doesn't do recruitment much good.

Re:Block them from flying over cities?

[dlgeek]

I believe it's from one of the Austin Powers movies.

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[instarx]

I don't think invading Iraq was the right thing to do in retrospect, but couldn't it have a "swamp draining" effect on terrorism?

No, because there were no [international] terrorists in Iraq at the time of the invasion. There were defintely no Al Queda terrorists in Iraq. If there was one government that bin Ladin hated more than the US and Israel it was the secular Sunni dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. To make your swamp analogy accurate - the Iraq war was like re-directing a river to MAKE a swamp. It would seem less than rational to be creating swamps when you are tying to get rid of them.

Don't confuse Al Queda in Iraq with the al Queda that attacked the WTC. The two are related in name only. Plus, what the heck are we doing providing a local training ground, just a bus ride away, for jihadists? We're going to be suffering the consequences of the Iraq invasion for decades. That's the big problem that no one seems to recognize - there is NO winning in Iraq - all we are doing is creating and training our own future enemies.

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[instarx]

I have no idea how you got modded so insightful.. are airline jets now somehow regarded as the most effective weapon on earth since Sept 11th? Almost anything can be an effective weapon if you know how to use it. A missile happens to be one of the most effective weapons ever created though, and is much preferable in a lot of situations to a passenger jet.

COST: If you're on a budget they are.

EFFECTIVENESS: Two airliners brought down the WTC buildngs, and two missiles could never have done that. Hint: it was the fuel, not the impact.

ECONOMICS: Crashing airliners also have the advantage of crippling your transporation system and causing economic damage far out of proportion to the physical damage they might do.

AVAILABILITY: How many airliners are there within 50 miles of you right now, and you can get on any of them for a $200 ticket. How many missiles are there near you, how close can you get to them?

EASE OF USE: Would you have a chance in Hell of firing a missile even if you did get near it?

EASE OF TRANSPORT: Try transporting a missile across the country to a place near your target. Good luck on that. Airplanes on the other hand are delivered daily by professional pilots to handy locations near your targets.

You haven't relly thought this out, have you?

Re:You say: "Defense"...

[instarx]

There are no shortages of people willing to die.

Do you think terrorists are going to BUY an airplane!? LOL

Having myself been trapped in Europe after 9/11 because of the shutdown in air travel I know that terrorist activites with airplanes disrupts the transporation system even when runways aren't destroyed. But even that was short-lived. The big problem is if there is another terrorist use of an aircraft there will be world-wide effects on air travel, security, and commerce. The only bright spot in the US economy, international tourism, would drop to zero. Airlines would go bankrupt.

If you are concerned with likelihood of success, doing the most damage to an economy possible, and creating as much fear and panic as possible an airliner is a vastly superior weapon to a missle.

In fact, as far as effctiveness goes, three or four large truck bombs set off around the country would cause vastly more damage to the economy than missiles.